Yes it's like inline styling, but the difference is that with Tailwind your build has just 1 CSS class with { display: flex; } used across your HTML, rather than inline styling or decoupled stylesheets with hundreds of instances of {display: flex}. If you use a framework like React, Angular, Svelte, it makes sense because your styles are usually coupled to your components anyway.

There is a real though very niche reason why having fewer selectors is useful, speaking as someone who has run into the selector limit in IE before.

Also speaking from experience — you have to have a lot of bespoke CSS and virtually no design system / internal consistency to run into that limit (a.k.a the Movember 2013 brand refresh).

And finally, when you did run into the IE selector limit, you could just split the style sheet in two (fairly trivial if you were using Sass), because the selector limit was per stylesheet.

the style attribute doesn't have the full power of stylesheets (and thus tailwind).

media queries and pseudo-elements are impossible, just off the top of my head.

Tailwind's patterns for device responsiveness are actually the most intuitive I've tried

With inline styles you can’t do media queries (e.g., so your site can look good on both phones and desktops) or pseudo selectors (e.g. :hover).

Also, though it’s lower-level than something like bootstrap, it does have a design system. Bootstrap is like building a model from a kit, plain css is like building a model from scratch, and tailwindcss is like building a model from lego.

It's exactly the same but denser. There's no benefit that Tailwind brings that you can't get from writing your own cleaner CSS files. It's like a cult.

Yes, the only thing it does is makes writing styles slightly faster and stops you having to name every different component

Styles? Doubtful. Naming components? We have to do that anyway with how JavaScript/TypeScript frameworks work these days. Tailwind is a different way of doing it that introduces unnecessary abstractions. To me, that makes it worse than writing vanilla CSS. With CSS you don't have additional dependencies and build processes. It's just CSS.

For me, when I'm working on a layout (I'm not a designer at all) it's quicker for me to parse words that describe what I want, than to type out

style="border-radius: 5px; border: 1px solid #2563eb; background-color: #3b82f6"

Personal choice obviously, but I work with frameworks and components if I'm doing frontend stuff, so having things as a single name for something that is consistent across everywhere I use it makes it easier for me.

It's not for everyone, and that's cool.