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Yes it's like inline styling, but the difference is that with Tailwind your build has just 1 CSS class with { display: flex; } used across your HTML, rather than inline styling or decoupled stylesheets with hundreds of instances of {display: flex}. If you use a framework like React, Angular, Svelte, it makes sense because your styles are usually coupled to your components anyway.

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There is a real though very niche reason why having fewer selectors is useful, speaking as someone who has run into the selector limit in IE before.

Also speaking from experience — you have to have a lot of bespoke CSS and virtually no design system / internal consistency to run into that limit (a.k.a the Movember 2013 brand refresh).

And finally, when you did run into the IE selector limit, you could just split the style sheet in two (fairly trivial if you were using Sass), because the selector limit was per stylesheet.

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