Exactly. Tailwind's utility classes correspond 1-1 with CSS attributes more or less. Then you have variants to help you target things like hover and focus states as well as pseudo elements like before and after. But Tailwind does nothing to hide away CSS in that you still have to understand flex and grid layouts, padding, z-indexing, margins, etc.

What Tailwind does give you is a way to build on top of a design system. The Tailwind config gives you a pretty good default design system in terms of spacings (padding and margins), colours (palettes and shades), etc. And you are free to modify or make your own design system, but once you do your design is much more likely to be consistent.

You can of course achieve the same design system with css custom properties (aka variables), but you have to be much more cognisant of using them. With Tailwind the design system is the default and you have to go out of your way to use custom values.