I agree it has a place for rapidly prototyping a design. But it pukes in the face of the “DRY” principle and wouldn’t keep it around in production. Use it to get the look right, take the styles and abstract to a sensible place in the design system or component hierarchy passing in the values so you can change one thing not a load.

Just following the idea that making life easier for yourself six months from now when you don’t have the current project “context” in your head is way better for lowering technical debt.

Oh and we will probably be into another fashionable styling framework by then! ;-P

It's been explained in many blog posts as well as in the Tailwind documentation itself. It's meant to be used with components (or partials). There's no copy-pasting involved and is very well-suited for production code.

And this applies to any utility-based CSS framework.