It's easy to understand why it gets people "riled up." For 20+ years the entire industry has been pounding the table about why inline styles are so bad. Thousands of articles have been written espousing this idea, and likely hundreds of thousands of hours have been spent devising better alternatives in the form of CSS frameworks.

Whether Tailwind is functionally and pragmatically better than inline styles isn't even important. It looks like inline styles, so the first reaction of almost any experienced designer/developer that looks at it is to make that association and squirm in discomfort at its mere appearance.