I recently went down a similar path to build the FE of an app. It worked fine at first and I learned a whole lot about recent updates to CSS. And boy, has it come a long way. Cascade layers, nesting, and the :has selector tripple-handedly change how views can be written for the better.

It is a solid solution for blogs and apps with a distinct document feel, but for anything beyond that I found it too limiting and brittle. Back to components and Tailwind.

I don't get this comment at all; you say CSS is too limiting but somehow Tailwind, which is just applying CSS using classes is liberating?

Tailwind actually complicates a lot more things, when you have to specify variants for example, there you go installing tw-variants, writing Javascript just so you can get different sorts of buttons.

This is fine for larger component libraries like shadcn-ui, but for simplicity, I'd pick up pure CSS for something like button .error; and button .secondary.

(yes I know you can just @apply whatever you want inside those blocks, but what's the benefit of tailwind then?)

Looks like I threw myself in to a Tailwind flamewar. I should've known better.

TW+TSX is easily the most productive way for me to write UIs and has been for 5 years. Don't like it? Don't use it but please leave me alone.

I've never heard anyone complain that CSS is too limiting. If anything it's the opposite.

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