There are a bunch of great 3rd party components available in tailwind now. https://daisyui.com/ is one I've been using. They're usually a tad bit lower level than typical framework component libs, but the flexibility is great.

A great thing about that is they're not React-specific, Vue-specific, etc. You can use them in everything from raw html to your JS library flavor of choice.

I had to do it with a BEM codebase, and I also had to do it with tailwind. The tailwind situation was by far the easiest one. And it was because I was not afraid to remove things that could break unrelated parts of the application. Not allowing developer to hand write CSS is a great restriction for a good bunch of developers. The messes out there are unbelievable.

Yes, many times, with normal CSS. It's basically the point of cascading style sheets. Sticking to proper class names and elements makes reskinning a breeze.

The "cascading" part is what makes it incredibly complicated. Keeping the "cascade" in sync with the actual markup is not a trivial task in teams with many people of different skills levels.

Not everyone is a top 1% dev, so we need easier and safer tools so that everyone can work and maintain a codebase.

> Sticking to proper class names and elements makes reskinning a breeze.

This is more easily said than done. It's like saying "Just don't write bugs". Every single project I find that has been built with BEM and similar patches after a couple years are just a mess and their CSS becomes "append only", as there's no guarantee that removing something won't break in unexpected ways.

Sorry, but this might just mean one file-include per tag if you use tailwind-css. The in-line CSS exceeds the HTML content by sometimes an order of magnitude bloating the page HTML to ginormous size.

"We all use 'cascading sheets' now. If you're working on a CSS file longer than a couple hundred lines, properly formatted, you're not abstracting enough or it's a one off marketing thing."

It's an acceptable trade off. Nothing is perfect. In exchange you're guaranteed those changes only affect this markup, and not some other li > ul > a whatever somewhere else.

> Might as well go back to doing inline styles

No, it is not. This has been explained thousands of times anyone says "tailwind is like inline styles". You can do responsive, you're limited to a consistent subset of rules, minimal output css file, caching, etc, etc. For example, here [1] is an explanation why it is not the same, but there are thousands.

By reading your answers I deduce you've not used it yet. And this is exactly what is being discussed here. Fanatics closed inward looking people will never like it, nor anything that defies what they've been taught for years. Like religion almost. You have to try it for real to see the benefits. It is not perfect, but the net result is very positive for a lot of people as you can see from the usage statistics. Just be a bit more open minded to new tech and give it a try. At least you'll understand why it is not the same as inline styles which is a pretty basic thing you understand after 1 hour of using it.

[1] https://frontstuff.io/no-utility-classes-arent-the-same-as-i...

I agree, main point is that I think there are better tools for large codebases. We had a "no CSS" rule where we used bootstrap components and utility classes only.