I didn't like it at first glance either but Tailwind is very sane. Every not-Tailwind approach I've encountered over the last 20 years has laughably and without exception fallen into the exact same problems that led to Tailwind being created: https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-...

If you're a solo dev, sure, you're free to do anything you want and nobody will balk or complain about you causing them extra work or having to clean up a mess later. If you're on a small project and the CSS will fit onto a couple sheets of A4 paper, you also won't have enough volume of code to see major benefit because you could just rewrite an entire UI of that scope from scratch in a few hours. But on a team working with a larger codebase Tailwind solves real problems in maintaining styles across developers and over longer periods of time.