That's fair. If the question is "would I use Tailwind primarily for layouts and little else" then the answer would be "no". I would definitely use CSS variables along with grid or flexbox, because its essentially the same end with less complexity.

I would also point out that Tailwind only makes sense to me when I'm also breaking up each individual UI element like cards or buttons into reusable components, either using a reactive framework like React or Vue, or a server-side template system. I'm not sure the maintainability of Tailwind survives with more monolithic HTML pages.