It’s random sure, but it’s also reliably random. This is one of the few footguns that exist in tailwind and luckily it’s super easy to catch. The IDE plugins will give you a warning if you apply multiple classes that manipulate the same attribute and there is no reason you also can’t catch it in CI.

Is it ideal? I guess not, but there are a lot of weird gotchas and footguns in CSS too. Just because they’re in the language doesn’t make them magically more or less of a problem. For a similar weird mental shift, consider adding @starting-style and the native popover open attribute. All the good tutorials online have a warning about cascade order because as a human reading it, it can seem wrong or backwards.

Kevin Powell’s most recent video about animating display: none covers it if you want a concrete example.