Tailwind has example called hocus that is similar to what you are saying, although the good thing is with custom modifiers, you can chain them as you like for example lg:trigger:bg-red-300

I agree on the struggle of working with Next.Js to accomplish simple things, which if we go back to the basics of just serving things from the server will do the same thing. Some applications might need this complexity tho to accomplish FE heavy computations, etc. But for most of the websites that I See today, they also tend to go in the FE frameworks when it might not be needed so they end up complicating their life