"Whatever you do, don’t use @apply just to make things look “cleaner”. Yes, HTML templates littered with Tailwind classes are kind of ugly."
That is straight from the Tailwind docs: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/reusing-styles
Using @apply a lot just reinvents CSS; that's not the point of Tailwind.
I can write similar comments about the rest of your statements, but I think you're too narrow minded to accept any input so I won't bother.