> the major stumbling block has been how tailwind is mostly just css translated into its own hard-to-memorize lingo.

Autocompletion in your IDE makes this easy (the class names are similar to the CSS attributes, even in your examples, so you can usually guess them) and you use the same classes over and over again so you learn them quick. I barely spent 10 minutes in the Tailwind documentation the first few days because of the VSCode extension.