> tailwind frees you from having to spend excessive time building abstractions of styles/classes that will invariably change.

Abstractions like a hero image, a menu, a headline? Sure, it's easy to overthink things but most of the time, it's not that complex.

> placing the styles directly into the markup that is affected by it reduces cognitive load, prevents excessively loose selectors

In my opinion, it's the opposite. Besides the obvious violation of DRY and the separation of concerns, inline CSS can't be cached and it creates a lot of noise when using dev tools for debugging. It actually increases cognitive load because you have to account for CSS in two different locations.

Lots of people use Tailwind because they don't want to deal with the cascade, usually because they never learned it properly. Sure, back in the day, the web platform didn't provide much built-in support for addressing side effects of the cascade, but now we have @layer and @scope to control the cascade.

Tailwind uses a remnant of '90s web development (inline CSS) and built an entire framework around it. I get why it appeals to some people: it lets you use CSS while not requiring an understanding of how CSS works, beyond its most basic concepts.