> 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.

That seems like a false dichotomy. I'm a huge fan of locality (both in software engineering and in physis) but you can also "localize" your styles by scoping them appropriately. (Modern frontend frameworks typically do that automatically for you at the component level.) There is no need to use Tailwind for that.