Sure you could do everything on the HTML with Tailwind but they do recommend composing component classes for regularly used things. I’m not saying that solves all your concerns but it helps.

Abstracting out CSS into utility classes can make it much quicker to get a consistent looking site up while still giving you a little more control over the look and feel. Of course you can misuse this but I think people who don’t understand standard CSS make a much bigger mess of it than if they have something like Tailwind.