I've tried Tailwind on smaller projects and it's not a bad way of writing styling. Not having to think about class naming or selectors speeds things up a bit, and it's nice that it promotes only shipping the styles you need (i.e. no classes with lots of the same properties declared).

However, one thing I'm still wondering about is how easy it would be to maintain visual consistency in a large project with lots of components, and lots of different developers working on different parts of the app.

Say the branding guidelines a certain style, like rounded corners with some shadowing and a hover styles, something that can't be done with a simple utility class. This should be consistent across many different components and pages. Then, someone in design updates the guidelines to have a different value for rounding and shadows.

With Tailwind out of the box, each component now has to be updated separately, and developers have to remember, or at least be able to check in documentation if that exists, which components use this particular style.

Is the answer then simply to use @apply for combinations of style? Doesn't this simply re-invent CSS classes, and create another layer of abstraction (you now have a class, which is composed of other classes, which themselves are composed of values set in custom properties).

I'd be very interested to hear how people manage this in large teams, over time.