I'm not a huge Tailwind fan either, but this author is missing something major in his obsession about long lists of utility classes. The @apply directive is the

I'm not a huge Tailwind fan either, but this author is missing something major in his obsession about long lists of utility classes. The @apply directive is there to convert utilities into semantic classes, and eventually that's where you get on a Tailwind project. Where Tailwind is different is the development process. One problem with CSS is that before you can do anything, you have to come up with a class, ie some abstraction. You then start using that class all over your code until over time you realize it is the wrong abstraction. What Tailwind lets you do is get going without having to create any abstractions. Then as time goes on you see the repeated patterns in your code and can use @apply to refactor those into the correct abstractions. So you end up in the same place as traditional CSS, but the trip is much smoother. The author's complaints about pseduoclasses and break point are spot on though, and he only lightly touches on pseudo elements which are another huge black eye for Tailwind.