> the site docs garnering traffic (beyond potential tailwind labs conversions) is more of an indicator of a code or design smell than anything

I've heard this before, but it's really no different than vanilla CSS. My guess is that people started pointing this out is that Tailwind got more non-frontend people digging into styling more where they were hit with how much shit there is in CSS.

For me I know CSS quite well, but I would always have to look up some utility names that had no intuitive mapping. line-height is leading, flex-direction has no direct mapping, text-wrap is text but also font size is text, so if trying to do font-size:custom you had to do some weird syntax unlike the other custom value syntax lest it confuse text-[1rem] with a text-wrap rule. There are a lot of these weird decisions.

I love tailwind and will continue to use it, but it isn't perfect in this regard...