Tailwind looks bad on "paper". It violates a lot of "best practices". It is ugly. Yet in reality it works. It gets the job done. It is fast to work with.

Constraints are known to enhance creativity.

My constraint is "use vanilla CSS" ;) I made a huge solo project in tailwind. Never again. Vanilla CSS is perfectly fine for my own uses. In fact, I've gone a whole 'no classes' style and used as much semantic HTML and modern CSS and can get extremely far. No more looking into the tailwind docs to learn its syntax on a modern vanilla CSS feature that I've been waiting for.

IMO this is one of those things where theory meets practice. Theoretical coders (i.e. those who love the code itself, rather than how well it works for the end user) tend to hate on Tailwind, while those who prioritize end user value over code perfection tend to like Tailwind.

Semantic CSS is Java AbstractBeanFactoryBuilder. Or as Steve Yegge put it, Kingdom of Nouns.

Tailwind CSS is Python dictionaries where you don't create one user-order-deliver-date CSS class for every Noun you have.