“No, you have never worked on a real project!” :)
Both can be real projects, without quotation marks. I’m constantly surprised that there are so many different ways and processes to build a website; and people who think theirs is the best.
If we're going to discard some projects as real, a pretty easy filter is "were multiple people required to build it". People who need Tailwind to provide their design system like Tailwind, but they are usually working on very small-scale projects they're unlikely to maintain and upgrade like a project with real users, real design, and multiple engineers would. And a pretty easy proxy for the latter type of shop is "do you have people who aren't even front-end engineers doing your design", and that commenter was displaying all those signals to me.
Do you believe that
The New York Times (2023): https://tailwindcss.com/showcase/nytimes
Shopify (2023): https://tailwindcss.com/showcase/shopify
OpenAI (2023): https://tailwindcss.com/showcase/openai
GitHub (2022): https://tailwindcss.com/showcase/github
The Verge (2022): https://tailwindcss.com/showcase/the-verge
Google (2022): https://tailwindcss.com/showcase/google-io-2022
Microsoft (2022): https://tailwindcss.com/showcase/dotnet
Netflix (2022): https://tailwindcss.com/showcase/netflix
Mashable (2022): https://tailwindcss.com/showcase/mashable
don't have teams with "design chops"?
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Anecdotally, I can tell you that Tailwind is heavily favored by shiny designery startups. Many of the best designed websites these days are built with Tailwind, and design-oriented engineers are reaching for it first.
Back in 2018 I was arguing against utility classes and vetoing their use in projects I was involved with in favor of thoughtfully architected SCSS. By now in 2023 it's clear Tailwind has earned its place in high-end UI development.
Your first example implies "The New York Times" uses Tailwind. Besides that being hilarious, you click the link and immediately see there is a big subheading "Events"
I have never heard of NYT "Events", so I checked out their page:
https://www.nytimes.com/events
> Do you believe that [The New York Times Events doesn't] have teams with "design chops"?
Yes, yes I do.
Not really going to bother with the rest, you're joking if you think these top corps meaningfully rely on this 2-year-old CSS framework. I exactly believe that you're linking me to things thrown together quickly by a resource-strapped team, the "Events" example merely affirmed it
Edit: I sort of bothered
* GitHub Next - splash page
* Shopify - marketing page
* Google IO - marketing page
* Microsoft .NET - marketing page
* Netflix Global Top 10 - marketing page
* New York Times Events - extremely basic
* OpenAI - Attention grabber, but... the homepage didn't even use full width of nor center content in my 1440p display. Not exactly a UI-driven success
* Mashable, The Verge - Pretty bad websites.
This is my point. People use Tailwind to slap together something good looking and simple. They don't use it to build applications because you make your own design system for applications.
Some examples of SaaS companies that use Tailwind on the application side are PlanetScale, Fly.io, Lemon Squeezy, and Supabase.
The right path is having tools the team is currently, or will be productive with, and isn't the markedly wrong tool for a type of job.