And, as I'm sure you know, milliseconds are important in our craft. You can easily shave or add hundreds of milliseconds with HTML or CSS.
And to be honest, I find your general line of inquiry here to be quite agressive and dismissive. I think, respectfully, a little more good faith could further our understanding of each other.
Outside of consumer apps I am struggling to imagine a case where the HTML/CSS perf delta would be more important to capture than faster development time. I suppose part of why that doesn't seem like a good faith question is because you don't believe Tailwind dev time to be faster, so the tradeoff that I'm trying to evaluate is totally inane.
As for the case in point, in fact, I think CSS can be as fast if not faster. But that's totally for me to prove. Hehe.
That's why I'm working on a set of simple rules for efficient styling with CSS. A website with documentation, examples and tools is in the works. If you're interested, I can give you a heads up when it's online.
Feedback from Tailwind users is important and would absolutely be welcomed!
PS: thank you for the explanation.