That seems to be a straw man its never just plain html and CSS. Even if it were, what you describe just devolves into dozens of similar or slightly different

That seems to be a straw man its never just plain html and CSS. Even if it were, what you describe just devolves into dozens of similar or slightly different (many times by mistake) classes that all need to be maintained. I would much rather dig into a component that has been built to be flexible for all of those needs to keep it up to date, restyle of add new behaviors and designs requirements vs going through hundreds of html files looking for all of the classes that were created to do those variations you list above (including effectively duplicate (or worse yet cascaded with different behaviors to accommodate the different html construct they were placed on when created). I really did dislike tailwind from first learning about it, but using it has turned me on it 100%.