>Tailwind is for people who don't want to learn CSS
This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding on your part about Tailwind. Tailwind classes map very directly onto CSS properties. You can't use Tailwind effectively without knowing about the corresponding CSS ideas (although you can be unaware of how exactly to apply them in pure CSS).
Rather, tailwind is for people who don't want to _use_ CSS as it was intended to be used. Named classes and stylesheets just don't mesh with how my brain processes these things.
You (and super256) are right. You do need to understand CSS to use Tailwind well, which is more or less the point of this article.
I should have probably said "it's for people who don't want to deal with cascading", but IMO cascading is CSS's most powerful property. I can see how it gets confusing though.
I think that's a fair take. Tailwind and css-in-js's popularity points to a mismatch between how people want to actually use CSS and how CSS was designed to be used. It looks like people want isolated components, not complex cascading hierarchies.
I think that when :has becomes viable, we will open to the door to CSS-driven declarative UIs as opposed to imperative JS components, but this is pure speculation :-). I believe that a development style that takes advantage of cascading instead of fighting against it could perhaps become one of the new 'schools' of frontend development. I do not think it will become the most popular one, though.
This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding on your part about Tailwind. Tailwind classes map very directly onto CSS properties. You can't use Tailwind effectively without knowing about the corresponding CSS ideas (although you can be unaware of how exactly to apply them in pure CSS).
Rather, tailwind is for people who don't want to _use_ CSS as it was intended to be used. Named classes and stylesheets just don't mesh with how my brain processes these things.