CSS is like SQL for DOM elements.
Tailwind has become popular because like SQL, CSS is powerful and hard to do well; it takes skill.
Well constructed CSS is a thing of beauty. Tailwind...not so much.
Tailwind has become popular because like SQL, CSS is powerful and hard to do well; it takes skill.
Well constructed CSS is a thing of beauty. Tailwind...not so much.
When you're structuring an application around components—where a component is an encapsulated unit of layout, style, and behaviour—it doesn't make sense to start putting those three aspects in separate places. Under that model, you typically don't want stuff inside a component to be able to affect anything outside, which is where things like Tailwind, scoped styles, and various other recent styling tools start to make a lot more sense.
Now, you can argue whether or not that is a good way to build applications, but given it's how pretty much every desktop and mobile UI system works, I'm not inclined to say it's inherently wrong. It's just not a great match for the tools we have available to us on the web.
If it works, great, but I'm not going to base the architecture of my software around the desires of the 0.001% of users who even know that user style sheets exist.
The written Tailwind code might not be beautiful (still it tends to be simpler than well-constructed CSS), but it does not stop the resulting website from being beautiful.
Well-constructed CSS does not stop one from building non-beautiful websites with beautiful code.
Sure, CSS is hard and Tailwind makes it easier. God forbid people choose the tool with better DX.