Tailwind is similar: instead of extracting styles out to a separated styled component or even a separate .scss file, you collocate them with the rest of your layout. When I read code using Tailwind it's easy for me to "see" how things will look in a similar way that I can "see" how a React component will function at run time.
More concretely, I think these three things were important for me:
1. There's a really solid design system underpinning the Tailwind utility classes. With styled-components you start from nothing, and with off-the-shelf component libraries (e.g. MUI) you get a design system that isn't quite as well thought out. Tailwind's classes just work together really well out of the box because the defaults are so sensible. I'm not a designer, so this is a really big win for me.
2. Components help prevent class soup. I suspect I wouldn't enjoy Tailwind quite so much if I were writing plain HTML, but for things which _do_ need to be reusable like button styles I'm still writing code that looks like `<Button>...</Button>`. Nothing really changes here from styled-components -> Tailwind other than how the styles are written; they're equally maintainable.
3. One-off snowflake UIs are really easy to implement, because you can just write your classes right then and there. I've never worked on a nontrivial web application where _everything_ fits cleanly into the design system, and going through the ceremony of creating a styled component just to add a little bit of additional spacing is a pain. It also sucks for maintainability because a name like "Spacer" doesn't tell me anything about the styles, so I need to context switch and jump to the definition. In contrast, seeing "mx-2" instantly tells me what's happening.
I do think Tailwind's something that benefits from first-hand experience, though.