How to affect other elements when one element is hovered

Using the sibling selector is the general solution for styling other elements when hovering over a given one, but it works only if the other elements follow the given one in the DOM. What can we do when the other elements should actually be before the hovered one? Say we want to implement a signal bar rating widget like the one below:

This can actually be done easily using the CSS flexbox model, by setting flex-direction to reverse, so that the elements are displayed in the opposite order from the one they're in the DOM. The screenshot above is from such a widget, implemented with pure CSS.

Flexbox is very well supported by 95% of modern browsers.

.rating {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: row-reverse;
  width: 9rem;
}
.rating div {
  flex: 1;
  align-self: flex-end;
  background-color: black;
  border: 0.1rem solid white;
}
.rating div:hover {
  background-color: lightblue;
}
.rating div[data-rating="1"] {
  height: 5rem;
}
.rating div[data-rating="2"] {
  height: 4rem;
}
.rating div[data-rating="3"] {
  height: 3rem;
}
.rating div[data-rating="4"] {
  height: 2rem;
}
.rating div[data-rating="5"] {
  height: 1rem;
}
.rating div:hover ~ div {
  background-color: lightblue;
}

<div class="rating">
  <div data-rating="1"></div>
  <div data-rating="2"></div>
  <div data-rating="3"></div>
  <div data-rating="4"></div>
  <div data-rating="5"></div>
</div>

If the cube is directly inside the container:

#container:hover > #cube { background-color: yellow; }

If cube is next to (after containers closing tag) the container:

#container:hover + #cube { background-color: yellow; }

If the cube is somewhere inside the container:

#container:hover #cube { background-color: yellow; }

If the cube is a sibling of the container:

#container:hover ~ #cube { background-color: yellow; }

Only this worked for me:

#container:hover .cube { background-color: yellow; }

Where .cube is CssClass somewhere inside of the #container.

Tested in Firefox, Chrome and Edge.

In this particular example, you can use:

#container:hover #cube {
    background-color: yellow;   
}

This example only works since cube is a child of container. For more complicated scenarios, you'd need to use different CSS, or use JavaScript.