One declaration at the top of the stylesheet, unchanged for a year, doing all the specificity work.
@layer reset, tokens, primitives, components, utilities;
/* and the count of !important in the codebase:
2024 41
2025 6
2026 2, both in a third-party override */
A single-class utility beating a component rule without !important is what layers are for, and the count falling from forty-one to two is the measurement. The two that remain are overriding a plugin’s stylesheet, which is outside our layer order and is the one case the mechanism cannot reach.