Although Tailwind won't target those descendant elements for you, it doesn't block your ability to do so. We found that 95% of our CSS goes away, the remaining 5% is still there with complex selectors and/or CSS settings that aren't in Tailwind. That remaining small amount is far easier to deal with.

I also started out thinking the whole idea seemed backward. Now I think of it this way: it works extremely well in practice, even if in theory it won't.