This is not true for me. I’m not in the business of building frameworks and I find Tailwind really better. If CSS is the assembler, then Tailwind is the C programming language. At the end of the day you still work with the same box model, etc, but it makes me go faster. I find myself looking at the Tailwind docs even if I’m not using Tailwind - truncate would be a great example.

The other benefit of Tailwind is that it’s bringing a design system with it. So no more figuring out the px size of a font (“infinite” possibilites), just pick one of xs, sm, base, lg, xl, 2xl, etc. Same goes for colors. A tip from their Rafactoring UI book - consider building your app in grayscale and only add color later. Again, Tailwind brings 10 shades of gray, and by limiting options makes things easier.

The moment when I fell in love with Tailwind was when I was able to recreate a designer-made modal dialog from their book in the Tailwind playground in minutes, which was a feat considering my limited CSS skills. It felt like Tailwind gave me superpowers. Of course the modal in the book was made using the same design system that is embedded into Tailwind, but my previous statement still holds true.

That’s a really great analogy. Tailwind is neither “do it all manually” aka in plain css, nor is is a component library like bootstrap, which supplies styling for html element + custom component.

The issue with plain css is how hard it is to get right, which imo includes the flexibility to adjust to (continuous) change in a project. Also it might look like inline styles are close to tailwind, but it couldn’t be different.

Frameworks like bootstrap are great if you want to hit the ground running and it provides everything you need, but boy is it a pain to extend or use for non supported components. Milligram also sits in that space of styling html elements, but comes with less custom stuff.

Tailwind (as well as other utility css frameworks) sits in between those approaches. It abstracts common pains of plain css like reusability, constant context switching, sizing fragmentation, flexibility, … but the styling of html elements / components is up to the user of the framework. No need to fight the framework to let something look a certain way.

Which one is more useful imo depends on the goal

• Want to or need to be fully in charge how things look and are architected → Plain CSS
• Want to or need to be fully in charge how things look → Tailwind
• Looking for a neat looking set of predefined styling for html / components → Bootstrap/Milligram/Tailwind UI
• Looking for not just predefined components, but also sections or whole pages → Themes

This is a rough categorisation. Often tools sit in between those categories. E.g. latest bootstrap also has a few utility functions, but also there are bootstrap “themes”; Tailwind UI still has Tailwind beneigh;

See also DaisyUI