The author set out to find reasons to dislike tailwind and found them. I don't think tailwind really sets out to abstract away CSS, so that criticism doesn't m

The author set out to find reasons to dislike tailwind and found them. I don't think tailwind really sets out to abstract away CSS, so that criticism doesn't mean much. With tailwind you still need to know CSS. On top of that, you need to know how tailwind maps to CSS. From that perspective it's harder than CSS. But of course, we don't connect styles directly to elements that much in practice because we need a way to organize and group styles. Hence connecting styles to classes and classes to elements. In practice you end up with a styling language expressed as classes on elements. But the app specific, ad hoc ones tend to bet messy, inconsistent, poorly documented, have many holes, etc. Tailwind just gives you a well-thought-out, well documented, common class styling language. It's also nicely customizable, so you can use its tooling for your app-level stuff as well. It does leave an app-level organizational hole, IMO -- that is, where do you express your app-level styling decisions. Tailwind has some features for this, but the grouping/sharing aspect is weak. But "component"-oriented frameworks fill the gap very nicely, making them a nice complement to tailwind. I used it recently for a project with a custom design and it worked out very well.