Tailwind is fantastic precisely because the biggest benefit (tree-shaking to minimize the CSS that ships) massively outweighs the fact that Tailwind syntax "looks like" an anti-pattern and makes your code "look" ugly. Also, you get used to bundling your styling and JS code in one place with any component-driven framework like Next.js/React, and Tailwind works seamlessly with all of them. I guess I just prefer the benefits to the alternative, and I feel like the collateral damage of the alternative is definitely not worth trying to make front-end design code look simpler.

It's pretty much all personal preference. You can do anything with css modules, or use any other CSS extension.

I don't ever recall hearing about the specific, tangible benefits tailwind brings. Just a loose "it's faster", or "it's easier". It just feels like one of those things, in front end development, that are just hype-driven rather than actually bringing any ostensible benefit.

https://htmx.org/essays/locality-of-behaviour/

I'm not a big tailwind fan, but keeping styling in a separate file feels like a net negative

Yeah I'm not a huge fan of it, either. Well organized CSS is much nicer to work with. On the other hand, I'd prefer Tailwind to badly organized CSS.

You are not the only one. I also dislike it immensely. For a framework that established itself as "for developers who don't know or want to learn CSS", polluting the HTML in the manner you describe makes no sense. And no company I've worked at figured out how to prevent it from becoming a bloated, impossible-to-maintain mess.

I'm in the same boat. Tailwind always seemed insane to me, even after really giving it the benefit of the doubt and trying it out. I use it now only because its so easy for the LLMs to use, so I don't need to actually interface with it at all.

Btw are you from Oaxaca? Nice to see another Mexican in here.