I've been writing CSS since 1997 and tried every fad technique that's come along. Tailwind is the first one that didn't make me dread dealing with CSS.
Some people like Tailwind and find it incredibly helpful.
Some people don't.
Some people actively despise Tailwind.
No one has to 'win'. All these opinions can coexist.
Of course you can build big things with semantic CSS. You also can with Tailwind.
Even in this thread there are people doing so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34921960
I understand perfectly well why people like Tailwind. The problem is not initial productivity; indeed, I can write bash scripts too very quickly that make me feel infinitely productive. It's what comes afterwards, the maintenance, the teasing of code written, that Tailwind makes so difficult.
And sure, use what you want, but I won't use it.
The maintenance is what makes Tailwind awesome. I've written CSS professionally since Internet Explorer 6 and have gone through many different strategies for writing maintainable CSS (BEM, OOCSS, SCSS and multiple different CSS-in-JS methods) but Tailwind is the first time I actually feel relieved of all the issues. To me, it's such an enormous improvement from normal CSS that people arguing against it feels like someone trying to convince me not to use syntax highlighting.
Yes, being able to copypaste self-contained HTML with all styling included and no depedencies is amazing.
Your copy pasting analogy makes no sense because "syntax highlighting" was referring to you trying to convince me to stop using something I can't live without and had nothing to do with Tailwind. Anyway, nothing wrong with copy pasting code and avoid premature abstractions until they are needed. Being religious about DRY and trying to shoehorn subsequent iterations of similar code into an inflexible abstraction leads to unmaintainable monstrosities.
That's what CSS is, a HUGE inheritance graph, just even more convoluted, because absolutely every "class" is part of the same graph.