A brilliant look at how CSS custom properties allow you to both utilize the cascade and provide some level of scoping and proximity-based styling. Prior solutions include the ‘big blunt hammer’ of inheritance-based styling or ignoring the cascade completely utilizing methodologies like BEM, but as author Miriam Suzanne points out:

Custom properties provide a new, browser-native solution; they inherit like any other property, but they don’t have to be used where they are defined.