I misunderstood, yes you can get away with quite a bit by writing classes directly in your elements.
On the but side: it’s not elegant or user friendly to modify those classes during execution, where I had to use anvil.js and create a “hook” for each field and it’s onclicks. At that point I almost need to code the site from scratch elsewhere and then copy paste the code into Anvil, where I would link it up to the databases. I’d rather do it with the amazing python driven philosophy Anvil has.
And another but, possibly due to my current lack of front end experience, Anvil overrides a lot of what I am trying to put in my classes with material or bootstrap or default CSS they have in the app by default. I have to put out fires and constantly wonder why the shadow here or there didn’t work.