Someone in the comments said my CSS sun was too perfect, and it pissed me off until I tried it
Posted my all-CSS sunset scene last week and one commenter pointed out that every gradient stop sat at a clean 10% mark, so it read like a color wheel instead of a sky. I went back and moved stops to weird spots like 37% and 62% with box-shadow spread doing the haze, and the thing finally looked like a real 6pm in July. Anyone else had a comment sting for a day before it actually helped?
Been there with gradients looking too math-y. Trick that helped me was pulling colors from an actual photo of a sunset, then sampling the hex values at random spots instead of eyeballing where stops should go. Also try adding a tiny bit of noise or grain over the whole thing, it kills that smooth digital look real fast. Comments that sting are usually the ones worth reading twice.