TailwindCSS is useful for applying styles to isolated components, in paper-shredder scenarios. Devs using it get to ignore the cascade, don't have to name things, and can use the predefined spacing and colors.

It is of course quite unmaintainable (good luck with updating the class soup for a bunch of components across a project).

I personally just ... cannot. CSS in 2026 is incredibly powerful and beautiful. Embracing the cascade allows for minimal CSS (see ITCSS methodology). Standardizing spacing and type with https://utopia.fyi is brilliant. Standardizing colors with custom props is trivial.

But, it seems that a lot of people are not paid to think about CSS. Tailwind embraces that. LLMs love it, because it reduces the complexity of pure CSS.