I think most developers simply don't care about this, I know I don't*. I don't see CSS as some beautiful thing I should tweak and spend time naming and doing "right". I want to be able to slap some class names onto things that quickly make it look the way I want, with a system I know others will be able to grok almost immediately with a high level of consistency and get back to building the features that are actually going to attract customers and generate more value.

The advantage of Tailwind is commoditizing CSS into something no one has to really think about as deeply as you're suggesting we do. Someone who cares to can do that thinking and put it into a Tailwind class in one of the versions. It's also portable, in that anyone who works with Tailwind can come in and immediately contribute, instead of figuring out whatever structure we've built ourselves.

Tailwind provides me a lot of value in that it lets me continue building while providing a very nice UI (which is required in modern times) and not having to engage too deeply with styles, because I'm not trying to be a master of CSS, I'm trying to build a wholistic product and I have 500 other things I need to do.

* I'm a backend guy but recognize I need nice UIs.