One thing that has always struck me about Tailwind is that practically every argument its proponents use more or less boils down to “I never learnt CSS beyond a junior level”. It’s super common to hear Tailwind advocates say things like “Without Tailwind, we would just have one big disorganised CSS file that always grows uncontrollably and ends up with loads of obsolete stuff in it and !important everywhere! Tailwind is so much better!”.

CSS is a skill just like any other technical skill. If all you do is learn the bare minimum so you can bodge things until you get something that looks right, then your ambitions are going to outpace your ability to keep things organised very quickly.

The more experienced Tailwind proponents probably have better things to do than get dragged into yet another online flamewar :) I've done tons of CSS since the 90s before looking into Tailwind. After it clicked, I've mostly tried to avoid raw CSS. In a sense, you exchange one mess for another. Personally, I'd rather deal with a localized class soup than trying to make sense of overlapping, often contradictory, cascades of styles across multiple files. Both can be implemented cleanly, but I'd much rather clean up a Tailwind mess than a CSS one. And I find the development process much more enjoyable overall.

It's worse than that; the common arguments for Tailwind literally derive from total ignorance of how CSS is made to work, and a disposal of guidelines that developers would worship in any other context (i.e. Don't Repeat Yourself).

It's really frustrating to be talking with someone about Tailwind and CSS, and realize that not only do they not know what "cascading" means, they never even considered the concept might be useful in the context of a stylesheet.

You aren't wrong, but the _overwhelming_ majority of "full stack" devs I've worked with only know CSS at the most basic level and have little interest in learning it in depth. I myself have been programming for more than 20 years, doing web dev for almost 15, and I can't find the motivation to learn it well. There are too many technical skills to keep up with and CSS is pretty low down on my priority list. I would prefer to rely on specialists who are experts but companies aren't willing to hire dedicated front end devs.

Isn't Tailwind easy to understand when you look at the codebase, rather than putting in more effort to learn a pure CSS codebase? Isn't that part of the argument of Tailwind being easier to scale?

Personally, I'm not sure from my own dives into it that I'd still insist on bare CSS in a professional codebase any more than I'd insist on plain DOM manipulation. And I do at least see Tailwind classes as being a little less of a DSL than other, similar tools. But while I'm not going to be a purist about it at a workplace, I both agree with you and have noticed a layer even beyond your point: that overreliance on these things leads to not learning HTML beyond a junior level.

It gets really easy to lean on class-based CSS and use a `<div>` for everything instead of ever learning what a semantic element is.

And that contributes to other bad habits, like writing a bunch of JavaScript to define behavior that could just be natively handled by your browser.

A weird personal irony is that because no employer has ever asked me to directly write CSS, what's actually made me better at CSS is JavaScript -- namely that my understanding of selector logic has improved a lot after picking up Web scraping.

Isn't the same true of those who use a library that wraps SQL?

That’s the value of tailwind. You can just skip learning CSS and still get a good result. The benefit to learning it is marginal.