I just ducked all that, and started writing a plain old CSS with BEM like a mad man, and know what with a bit of discipline and good methodology it works as magic.
I think a lot of the love for tailwind are people finally getting the mental OK to remove the strict isolation of style and template/code which has been dogma for 20+ years. If you're using something like vue, svelte, or a good web components library you can just define components with all their markup and style in one place, all using bog standard CSS. It's fine.