Styling React components effectively is crucial for creating visually appealing and maintainable user interfaces in modern web applications. As the creator of CoreUI, a widely used open-source UI library, I’ve implemented various CSS strategies across thousands of React components including buttons, forms, and complex dashboard layouts. From my expertise, the most versatile approach is to use the className prop with external CSS files or CSS modules. This method provides excellent separation of concerns, easy maintenance, and seamless integration with design systems and CSS preprocessors.