> The folks over at Tailwind offered curated, hand-built components that were readily adapted and tuned to your own needs. They did an excellent job making it so you could pick and choose what you wanted, then theme all of it from your tailwind settings with ease. It was excellent.

They also offered an Open Source CSS framework with the explicit goal of making it easier for you to style your own components. There was always some tension between "make abstraction layer whose adoption depends on users finding it easier to make your own components with than vanilla CSS, which is not unusually hard" and "sell pre-made components". Particularly when there's an abundance of alternative FOSS components/libraries out there[1] in vanilla CSS or even full blown CMS templates for people not wedded to the idea that Tailwind makes things easy for them. Much easier to sell templates or even "premium components" when your USP is integrating them with a backend them rather than merely providing the layer of syntactic sugar supposed to make component styling easy...

They also happened to have the misfortune of designing it in a way which is particularly easy for AI which doesn't have to tradeoff time spent making design decisions and figuring out how to achieve those from the docs vs dollars spent buying components to minimally tweak.

[1]tbf, I always thought the Tailwind creators' designs were more tasteful than the average CSS mixin library even though I didn't think the same about the syntax...