> Sure, it's easy to overthink things but most of the time, it's not that complex. then you sir are the one that have not worked on complex projects. i'm currently the lead on a design system for a fortune 100 company with nearly 100 block level components and many other smaller elements. responsive, multi-theme/site support, animations, accessibility, robust interactivity, etc. not even a button or link is simple when you're building complex systems tailwind allows us to reason more clearly about these often very complex components

> inline CSS can't be cached

this shows your lack of understanding. first off, it's not inline css, they're classes and thus you only ever define "flex" in one place vs many many places in non-utility css approaches. in fact, sorted html classes are compressible over the wire so you're doubly wrong.

> because they never learned it properly condescending

> it lets you use CSS while not requiring an understanding of how CSS works, beyond its most basic concepts also condescending and just such a boring, over used argument i always hear from haters of tailwind maybe try and counter my arguments without the attitude? maybe understand seasoned veterans of css might have their reasons to choose it?

I disagree with that conclusion. I see tailwind as a cleaner more succinct version of css that is much easier to manage and add features too.

Sure it’s not as dry, but I’ve been bitten in this regard because css framework and templates are so intransparent, preventing me from simply changing padding or margin.

CSS is too detailed and too verbose. Frameworks like bootstrap are too high level and don’t give enough control. Tailwind hits the sweet spot whilst allowing me to be detailed if I want to. It allows me to just get it done.

With CSS names are global. You have to be careful not to accidentally create a class that conflicts with another one used elsewhere in a different context. You have to worry about whether modifying your class will have downstream effects on elements you weren’t intending to impact. It’s a giant pain. I’ve done it by hand for around 20 years before switching to Tailwind.

Can vanilla CSS be used for a complex app? Yes. But, it takes discipline, and I only have a limited amount of that. I’d rather spend my discipline budget on other things.

That said, nested selectors and CSS variables have gone a long way towards making the vanilla experience much more pleasant. I may have to give it a shot on a side project one of these days.

Your framing assumes incompetence across the board which is unlikely to be true for a framework of its popularity. Consider instead competent people are working on projects with different needs and they’ve recognized there are trade offs to both approaches and still decided Tailwind makes sense in their situation.

To be honest, CSS had the cascade but also had horrible tools for actually managing the cascade for a long time.

If CSS had nesting, variables, media queries, the other nice selector queries like :has, and modules out of the gate, we likely would have not needed much of the tooling like tailwind that eventually got built to manage it all with less boilerplate. We built the tools because even when these features rolled out they came in fits and starts so you couldn’t adopt it without polyfills and whatnot.

> inline CSS can't be cached

Can you elaborate what the problem is? What is it you want to cache?

> and it creates a lot of noise when using dev tools for debugging.

I don’t think so. The element styles have an own section (assuming you debug the applied styles)

> It actually increases cognitive load because you have to account for CSS in two different locations.

Same applies to no tailwind. You need to account for the html (is parent block / inline / …) anyway.

Premature DRY and premature attempt at separation of concerns have resulted in absolutely horrible spaghetti code in too many code bases.

Many times it's fine to repeat yourself. Many times it's fine for a component to cross multiple concerns.

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