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.