I think most developers simply don't care about this, I know I don't*. I don't see CSS as some beautiful thing I should tweak and spend time naming and doing "right". I want to be able to slap some class names onto things that quickly make it look the way I want, with a system I know others will be able to grok almost immediately with a high level of consistency and get back to building the features that are actually going to attract customers and generate more value.
The advantage of Tailwind is commoditizing CSS into something no one has to really think about as deeply as you're suggesting we do. Someone who cares to can do that thinking and put it into a Tailwind class in one of the versions. It's also portable, in that anyone who works with Tailwind can come in and immediately contribute, instead of figuring out whatever structure we've built ourselves.
Tailwind provides me a lot of value in that it lets me continue building while providing a very nice UI (which is required in modern times) and not having to engage too deeply with styles, because I'm not trying to be a master of CSS, I'm trying to build a wholistic product and I have 500 other things I need to do.
* I'm a backend guy but recognize I need nice UIs.
Well, I wouldn't say it's about CSS being a "beautiful thing". It's about delivering great experiences to our users, experiences that use our native tools in an optimized way.
Because, you can ship the same experience with less code, less dependencies, less complexity. You can better serve users by easily catering to their preferences via the cascade. You can make use of new technologies that increase performance (see, among others, HTTP3). You can profit from the newest supported CSS properties that are way more expressive and give you more flexibility for cheaper.
The advantage of Tailwind is commoditizing CSS into something no one has to really think about as deeply as you're suggesting we do. Someone who cares to can do that thinking and put it into a Tailwind class in one of the versions. It's also portable, in that anyone who works with Tailwind can come in and immediately contribute, instead of figuring out whatever structure we've built ourselves.
Tailwind provides me a lot of value in that it lets me continue building while providing a very nice UI (which is required in modern times) and not having to engage too deeply with styles, because I'm not trying to be a master of CSS, I'm trying to build a wholistic product and I have 500 other things I need to do.
* I'm a backend guy but recognize I need nice UIs.