Tailwind is a design system. It's not the same as inline styles because the options are constrained and are picked to fit on a coherent scale. I consider the inability to do this natively to be a longstanding gap in CSS itself and have been doing my own variations of the tailwind utilities with sass mixins since 2009.

I'll point out that CSS has no semantic component in itself. It's just a way to apply styles. If you want to keep semantic class names then you can apply the tailwind design language using the postCSS `@apply` in the body. There's a tradeoff between the value of semantics against the value of greater code locality and elimination of specificity as a concern. In practice most people seem to prefer the latter.