My guess: It's only a matter of time before Tailwind collapses. The vendor-specific language and the misleading communication cannot hold water very long. The utility soup produced today will eventually turn into a technical debt. The next generation looks back and asks: "You actually wrote that?" Learn to write clean HTML and CSS and stay relevant for years to come.

Utility-first CSS is exception-first CSS. And that’s not how exceptions work, in CSS or in general. …So what is Tailwind really? It’s just CSS with extra steps and a brand name. Then again, you can say that about most any CSS framework.

So, yeah, Tailwind: it’s kinda pleasant, while occasionally being an extraordinary pain in the ass. Meanwhile, in the past couple years since Tailwind rolled around, I’d say writing CSS is now also kinda pleasant, and while it also can occasionally be a pain in the ass, it’s far less frequent than it used to be.

In the end, the benefits of Tailwind kept vanishing, to a point where we still see a useful, but also very tiny subset of utilities that could work for us… After all this time experimenting and working with utilities, I see their appeal in quite a few places. But I also really see where they hit some hard limits. Tailwind isn't the hammer for all nails.

This study compares two websites with identical design: the commercial Spotlight template from developers of Tailwind vs the same site with semantic CSS. The semantic version is 8× smaller, renders faster, and requires no JavaScript bundlers/tooling.