I do think that the real value of Tailwind comes from the utility classes, rather than css-in-html paradigm. You could achieve the same, for example, with Pollen.css [0] or Open Props [1].
This covers the design token part but it's very verbose (especially when you need responsive behaviour) when you want to iterate on styling a component compared to Tailwind and doesn't cover the other problems with CSS mentioned in https://tailwindcss.com/docs/utility-first. I guess it depends how complex your designs are?