This feels like the story of a lot of web tooling: accessibility over all else, especially performance/future maintenance. The fail-fast/move fast and break things culture of some startups bleeds into the aesthetics of tools. Knowledge of tools begins to be confused with skills. Ironically, it burdens new devs heaviest, as they're not able to sort through which concepts/abstractions that tools bring with them are worthwhile, and which are not.

It drove me away from the platform entirely.

(This isn't about Tailwind, I've never used it, so I can't comment on it.)

Blame companies and job titles like 'Full Stack Dev'