I think I understand tailwind, but like the parent poster I'm really not a fan, because while CSS can be a footgun, it can also be quite clean when you use a sane DOM structure, CSS variables, and well thought out CSS selectors.
This fall apart pretty quickly as soon as more developers join the project. Keeping consistency between multiple team members is hard without a reference point, which is what a framework like Tailwind provides.
In practice, they don't end up "quite clean" outside small personal projects.
Tailwind creates "stylesets", and is absolutely powerless to apply them. Quite like WYSIWYG text editors. So, yeah, anybody claiming you are learning CSS by using it doesn't really know CSS. But I disagree, that kind of thing can be useful on certain contexts.
i’ve yet to witness a project without “!important” scattered throughout the codebase.
Simplicity is a skill and it's hard to do. There's a reason most people are not minimalists despite the almost universal western desire to "have less stuff".
I've yet to see a single project that doesn't fail on all three.
Truth is I've been spoiled on that front because I had the luck to work for many year in a company where the CTO was a very talented dude who lived and breathed HTML/CSS since the mid-2000's, and who was quite thoughtful about that kind of stuff, so I had a first-hand experience of a good codebase, mostly by avoiding external dependencies, using the standard browser behavior, and frequently consulting the MDN.
This is why it's a bit disheartening to see so many front-end framework working against the plateform, even even marketing against it, while CSS and browser tooling his so much more enjoyable and powerful than before.
Technology that makes it easier to make bad decisions than good decisions is not a good technology.
> This is why it's a bit disheartening to see so many front-end framework working against the plateform, even even marketing against it
None of the frameworks I know of do that.
I believe it's mostly due to the fact that CSS, just like SQL, is one of those technology approachable enough to fiddle with it and get somewhat far, while not really learning it, and thus overlooking the fundamentals.
> None of the frameworks I know of do that.
I would squarely put into this category all the CSS-in-JS frameworks, such as 'styled components'. Also everything that markets the 'cascading' part of CSS as being a mistake.
Also, all the frameworks that compiles CSS without generating the CSS sourcemaps, making the debugging experience way less efficient since all the applied CSS rules shows under '<style>' (eg: 'styled-components' again, who discarded it as being 'cosmetic' in the related Github issue).