What often gets missed in the tailwind debate is how it forces you to use a design system. When you’re writing CSS by hand it can quickly get out of control when you need to bump something up or down, left or right by a notch. If you add padding it should be related to font size, line-height, etc on some sort of cohesive, harmonious scale. By using a Tailwind class of py-2 rather than writing a CSS class you can be confident that the change will fit with the design system as a whole. This is much better for most people than creating your own design system from scratch every time you need to make a web page. Once your design starts to solidify, just extract out common components like “button” out of the html using @apply.