What kinds of applications do you build? It sounds like having pixel perfect components that match exactly what the designers want is a really high priority for you. And that is fine but man it can really make dev go slower than using existing ones and I'm not always sure it's worth it.

I work in the fantasy sports domain with my primary focus building league management/draft software. I am both the "designer" and the developer of the tools I make. And I honestly wouldn't describe myself as someone who is overly pedantic about "design" in general.

But you may be surprised how often (and consequential) something as small as 2px padding, or line heights, or borders, or... [the list is just endless] can affect the final product. Especially once space starts becoming an issue (or you care at all about alignment).

The components of such software as the above are not "cards" and "lists" and "buttons", rather, it's "rosters" and "depth charts" and complex tables full of stats that need to be sliced and diced in all sorts of ways. A generic library (especially the kind that loves putting large swaths of spacing between things) is just not tenable.

Tailwind completely absolves the issues of managing literally hundreds of bespoke components on screen at once -- none of which can/should be reused in any sane sense of the word. Classic CSS quickly becomes a huge pain for the above. It's just... simpler to slap all of the styles inline right into the element. It took me no more than 2 days to become rather adept at using (and extending!) tailwind. At this point I simply cannot imagine doing it any other way.

I'm now building a back office/admin part of a site. The part where designers are rarely seen. And boy, does Tailwind help.

In that case wouldn't an existing component library be better? For something like that it seems function would be favored over design so you could get away with a generic looking component library.

My thoughts exactly. Especially if "do it exactly as non-dev design folks who don't actually ever write functional code decided it should be 3 months ago before they moved on to another project" isn't a requirement, something like vuetify gives a lot of functional and visual consistency (while providing standard support for a lot of accessibility stuff), in a tested and progressing toolkit.

A colleague consolidated new dev at his employer under vuetify and it took away some of the "design meetings", and allowed them to turn around projects faster (anecdotal, to be sure). All internal 'line of business' type stuff.

People keep mentioning vuetify. It implements Google's Material UI, and it's the last thing I ever want anywhere near a website.

Also, regardless of how extended component libraries are, they are still quite constrained in what they can do. Especially in layouts.

I mention vuetify as its faster to type than 'bootstrap-vue', but BSV is what I've used more. Used vuetify on one small prototype at the suggestion of some colleagues - some differences and nice aspects compared to BSV, but I default back to BSV for familiarity/speed/completeness. vuetify seemed to have some nicer defaults for accessibility compared to BSV, but it wasn't enough to make me switch (also, because... I'm not a huge MD fan either).

Often the developers have very little choice. They're handed a spec and told "go make this" and what they make has to be pixel perfect. Personally I think that very very few businesses actually need to do this, and adopting this way of thinking is backward and counter-productive (especially when perhaps more important things like accessibility are not even a consideration), what I think isn't the point.