That sounds like a pretty straight forward and simple conversation.

Do you do code reviews? Have code owners? If you (or a set of people you trust) were required to sign off on changes on the base files that aren't supposed to be changed willy-nilly, you could catch it before it went to main

This sounds like a job for a team wide code review process.

If you don't say anything, it won't get better. Up to you whether that's worth the hassle, based on your team and your situation, of course

Should I approach the team about this?

Yes, certainly. It sounds like some/most members of the team don't understand the stylesheet architecture of your project and it's vital to sort that out ASAP. The more time passes, the harder it will get to get everything back on track.

Try to avoid finger-pointing and this shouldn't be a very hard conversation (assuming they aren't super stubborn).

As a side note, the fact that you first address this issue on the Fediverse and not in your team makes me think that maybe there are some underlying issues regarding trust and open communication. You might want to further look into that. Take it with a large grain of salt though. I don't really know anything about your team so it's likely that I overdramatize the situation.

Someone in your organization needs to be in charge of frontend fidelity. I don't mean an official job title, I just mean someone who has taken it upon themselves to have a "the buck stops here" mentality—better yet someone who is recognized by the rest of the team to have that priority.

If nobody else fits the bill, then that person is you. And by all means, make all the stink you want about these issues. Nobody should ever be touching global stylesheets that affect multiple components or screens throughout the system without there being subsequent review or issues filed in a very visible way. Ideally, those sorts of breaking changes would never make it through code review in the first place.

1. passive aggressive email

2. let qa bust them

3. collective email reminder to the whole team not to edit the base class, variation of #1

4. fix it yourself and say nothing, snitches get stitches

5. snitch

6. create a copy of the base further down so it just overwrites their changes -- I forget if this works, maybe make a copy above too just to cover your angles

7. ask them to find the bugs in someone else's commits and see if they fix their own shit

Do you have code review?

I think this can be resolved with code review (as others have mentioned), but there's also a lack of understanding on how to use the components you have created. Maybe a quick email politely explaining the theory/approach behind these base classes, with some examples of do-s and don't-s could work alongside code review to enforce the change

You can keep bringing it up. But, in my exp, if you dont have anyone high up that can support your perspective, it's just gonna be an uphill battle. And is likely just going to make the other devs unhappy with you.

It's unfortunate but most devs dont really like anything that's going to cause them more work (e.g. more code reviews, higher quality changes, looking at the bigger impact of their changes etc).

If you don't have someone higher up —maybe the manager of the managers of those problematic engineers—I'd just make more tests around the areas that are breaking and require those tests to pass before merging code changes. Devs may not like to work harder, but they damn sure dont like seeing a bunch of red X's when they open a PR lol 😃