That's sad to hear, if true, and I'd have gladly paid for Tailwind if they'd had a "OK, so you use our CSS indirectly" program in place. I'm aware of "Tailwind Plus", but that seems to be React-only, and thus the opposite of where I want to be.
You can actually use tailwind via the script tag in a plain HTML file. Not for production, but great for whipping up prototypes
It's not React only. It has pure/regular HTML, React, and Vue. I have mainly only used the pure HTML personally as I use Phoenix/LiveView for most of my stuff, and it works phenomenally well and is very copy/paste friendly. The UI/console they provide is also top notch. For others who do use React, the React stuff also worked well too for one project I did that was a SPA.
It's well worth the money IMHO.