Programming

Tailwind only really makes sense in a precise use case that absolutely does not cover everything web based and I wish the makers where clearer about it.

First off, the abstraction problem: since you give up on defining custom classes at length, elements will often receive more than a dozen utility classes. This is fine IF you use a component based framework like Vue and you break down your app into components with a small granularity.

Second, the stylesheet problem: even minified and compressed, a stylesheet containing all of Tailwind's utility classes is multiple Megabytes. The issue will not come from where you'd expect; downloading may take a while on the first page load, but all page loads will suffer from taking into account such a massive set of rules. Tree shaking makes this fine IF your content is already known at the moment of building the app.

In the end I feel that Tailwind implements ideas on top of tech it is incompatible with and the abstractions it create are seriously leaking.