And yes, I am looking at you, Mom... ;)
@apply and the frowned upon solution is what I would expect to be the only clean solution.
I am a proponent of WET, but pulling the naming things card when it comes to places that you may want to localize, test or aria-label anyway, just seems lazy to me.
There's also a difference between naming things of actual significance, which as you say may need to be localized, labeled, etc. and having to name arbitrary CSS junk like .button--state--success, which is painfully annoying. Type it up in the CSS file, switch over to the markup file (another annoyance that Tailwind helps you avoid), paste it in, repeat.