For what it's worth, I was exactly where you are 3 years ago. I made all of the same arguments. I saw the value in Tailwind. I had come from rebuilding a CSS system for another application multiple times because we never could get it to work for us.

I would have never believed me now either, not until I saw it done first hand and learned how to do it. So, call it uncommon knowledge, or a rare skill, or whatever you want, but do know that not only is it possible, but the skills required are the same skills that enable you to build maintainable applications -- not just CSS.

In large part, this is why we failed in the past. We would often treat CSS as a second-class citizen and put our most junior "front end" developers on it. It should have been no surprise that it ended up as a tangled mess.

> You don't have to switch files to add CSS and invent meaningful names for styles, then ensure you use the same name in the markup file, nor do you ever have to hunt down and change these names and the markup across multiple files to ensure they are applied consistently down the road of you're using HTML components.

This isn't a real problem. The only time we've struggled to come up with a name is when CSS forces us to use some mechanical name that includes the word "container" or something like that. Usually, we just name the thing what it is. Usually, very often this is in the domain of the UI (hint, it is likely the same name as your React component, if you are using React and naming things well).

There's another problem here that complicates things. Most people shouldn't be using React for their forms over data applications. It's unnecessarily complex, but people now tend to think that server rendered HTML is yet another lost art. React plays very well with Tailwind in a sense, because you are already forced to make components for your UI, so what's sprinkling a little class soup in that file? What's sprinkling a few type declarations in the same file? What's sprinkling a few hooks in that file? What it all adds up to, once you can see it, is very difficult to read and reason about code all in one place. You can learn to see through the forest, but I personally would rather work on one tree at a time.

By the way, I'm not advocating for writing HTML in multiple places (and therefore re-using the CSS classes), that often should be abstracted in some way. In Rails, we use helpers and view template partials. Every technology has its options. Technically, web components fit this bill as well, but we don't make heavy use of them as I've found them unnecessarily complex.