I think there's a chance that you're using it in a project it isn't suited to. For your first reason, component driven applications provide a compelling reason

I think there's a chance that you're using it in a project it isn't suited to. For your first reason, component driven applications provide a compelling reason to go "back" to inline styling. You already have your abstraction, and adding another one (cascading styles) does you no favors. It just creates two interleaving re-usability schemes that are a nightmare to maintain in parallel. This is the same reason that component-local CSS has become very popular. Second one is a reasonable enough criticism. Never bothered me, but I think it's fair. Third: it's really designed for bundled, JS-based, component driven applications. In that context it's a breeze to set up, and really no more difficult than native CSS. By the way, the reason they do that is so it can do some clever things like removing the utility classes from the CSS that you actually ship to reduce payload size. There's no reason that you can't just build the entirety of Tailwind and just ship that as your CSS.