You could “achieve” this with raw CSS classes easily, sure, but good luck maintaining your hand-authored design system.
Tailwind is successful because it has a very well-thought-out design system powering it. If that sounds like a “non-problem” to you, then it isn’t for you.
Exactly. In terms of design, something like tailwind is a great example of the 'templatization' of design and communication, where ease of authoring and maintainability is valued over producing artefacts that are appropriate.
I don't know if this is even remotely true, but I would guess Tailwind, and things like it, are more popular in agencies (sweatshops) that are pumping out projects where junior staff are the ones writing the majority of frontend code.
For the type of thing I do, "hand-authored" doesn't mean "unmaintainable".
In the real world projects tend to have staff with a range of skill levels, and deadlines. This isn’t just in “sweatshops”. Being a skilled engineer means understanding these constraints and choosing tools that help your team succeed, even if you could flex and do everything yourself, maybe even better.
But if you’re equating TW with something like the bootstraps of yore, you’re misunderstanding it.
Tailwind is a set of design primitives and tooling that are designed to work together in a manner that is more flexible than something like Bootstrap. You could recreate bootstrap’s look -with- Tailwind. See the many off the shelf UI libraries created this way. Tailwind however isn’t designed to create off the shelf generic Ui libraries. It was created for building bespoke UIs that have their styles tightly coupled to their markup. You know, components…
Bootstrap & co is really more like a set of preset styles and UI logic which you can use to quickly get some UI working.
If these distinctions are too subtle to matter for you, then you aren’t facing the problems that Tailwind or similar tools are meant to solve.
Tailwind is successful because it has a very well-thought-out design system powering it. If that sounds like a “non-problem” to you, then it isn’t for you.