Flex has indeed figured it out, I use it for everything now and rarely touch margin: auto unless I'm being lazy or there's a very simple usecase.
But that said Flex still very much classic CSS: the awkward naming schemes, the excessive options for each parameter, the mixing of different options available, etc... it's still very much CSS in all it's quirky dirtiness.
CSS Grids kind of shocked me that they weren't entirely convoluted.
Maybe it's the design-by-committee stuff but even as CSS has gotten better: it still took way too long and it's still very weird. Maybe like JS this will slowly no longer become true, but I'm kind of happy I grew up without Flex/modern CSS because I'm unafraid of that quirkiness.