I am not saying that it was the same at every company and your personal experience may be different.
This was absolutely the norm at a lot of companies. It was very normal for the developers to work in either PHP or Ruby on Rails and the designers wrote CSS.
It is also true that since the introduction of modern frameworks we see significantly fewer designers who know CSS.
It was never the norm. I've worked as a contractor/consultant in a lot of places and I saw two people that were "designers" that could write HTML and CSS. That is two people in 18 years.
> It is also true that since the introduction of modern frameworks we see significantly fewer designers who know CSS.
None of these people knew CSS at all. I am talking pre-2012. Bootstrap version 1 or 2 was out at the time and 960 grid css was only out a few years before.
This was absolutely the norm at a lot of companies. It was very normal for the developers to work in either PHP or Ruby on Rails and the designers wrote CSS.
It is also true that since the introduction of modern frameworks we see significantly fewer designers who know CSS.