How to style QWidget descendants when parent is being hovered?

creativegamer03

Hello. I'm new to this forum, and I'd like to ask how this can be achieved.

My current project is more of made for fun, and it's a custom client I'm making for Revolt chat and Discord. Currently, I'm able to layout the whole chat window to display server-specific chats and interactions. Now, I switched from QListWidget to QScrollArea due to the former's limitations (especially for auto-adjusting QLabels in my custom widget when added as an item). However, I do miss the highlighting effect that QListWidget provides for its items, and I am currently trying to mimic its effect, albeit more simple if possible.

Initially, I used stylesheets to style the ChatMessage's descendants. (Provided stylesheets was for testing purposes before actual styling)

ChatMessage:hover * {
    background-color: cyan;
}

Unfortunately, it seems it doesn't follow usual CSS rules considering that it should, theoretically, apply the styles to its descendants when a ChatMessage is only being hovered; instead, it applied the styling regardless. If there's a way to actually do this kind of conditional styling (e.g. style descendants when parent is being hovered), please let me know. :)

Some additional information if you need:
The ChatMessage custom widget code (simplified):

class ChatMessage(QtWidgets.QWidget):
    def __init__(self, parent = None):
        super(ChatMessage, self).__init__(parent)
        self.reactions = {}
        self.edited = False
        ...
        self.content = QtWidgets.QLabel()
        self.content.setWordWrap(True)
        ...
        message_header = QtWidgets.QWidget(self)
        message_header_layout = QtWidgets.QHBoxLayout()
        
        self.author = QtWidgets.QLabel()
        self.author.setTextFormat(QtCore.Qt.TextFormat.RichText)
        ...
        self.timestamp = QtWidgets.QLabel()
        ...
        self.message_toolbar = QtWidgets.QToolBar(self)
        ...
        # quick react bar test
        self.message_toolbar.addActions(self.reaction_actions)
        ...
        message_header_layout.addWidget(self.author)
        message_header_layout.addWidget(self.timestamp)
        message_header_layout.addStretch()
        message_header_layout.addWidget(self.message_toolbar)
        message_header.setLayout(message_header_layout)
        ...
        layout = QtWidgets.QVBoxLayout()
        layout.setSpacing(0)
        layout.addWidget(message_header)
        layout.addWidget(self.content)
        ...
        self.reaction_bar = QtWidgets.QToolBar(self)
        ...
        layout.addWidget(self.reaction_bar)
        ...
        self.setLayout(layout)
        ...
    # The rest of the actual code is mostly custom hover
    # event overrides to briefly show the quick react bar
    # on hover, a few helper methods, and slots to actions.

Screenshots to demo the behavior:

creativegamer03

Update...

So I was able to just use the overridden hover event methods to apply the stylesheets as I wanted. But I do feel that there might be a better way to do this.

For now, I'll be using this method instead as it works as I wanted.