I'd argue a lot of the complexity in CSS comes from how people typically write it: lumping a bunch of properties into "semantic" classes, then trying to juggle

I'd argue a lot of the complexity in CSS comes from how people typically write it: lumping a bunch of properties into "semantic" classes, then trying to juggle how those all cascade and interact when nested within other such classes. I think we've all lost the will to live trying to "undo" a style cascaded from an element's great-great-grandparent. Of course, you don't have to do that—you could write your CSS classes as ultra-low specificity classes that each only target one property...but I think you'll find that's what Tailwind is :)