The thing is you have to use build tools to use Tailwind. It doesn't work (well) without it being able to search your templates to generate css for the classes

The thing is you have to use build tools to use Tailwind. It doesn't work (well) without it being able to search your templates to generate css for the classes you use. So anyone using Tailwind already has the setup to add tailwind.config.js into their project. They make it as easy as it can possibly be. The reason why people don't change the config is that you need the default tailwind config for all the copy-paste-able snippets to work. People buy something like TailwindUI and copy what they find around. Including things like colors (which i find super stupid that the TailwindUI team didn't you know... use their own config OR css variables to be able to change brand colors). And that kind of usage of Tailwind is lazy and you won't learn anything. But that's up to people. It doesn't mean Tailwind is bad abstraction or not possible to use for efficient design systems.