Bear in mind that the Tailwind example is the official template made by the Tailwind developers themselves. It is the prime example of Tailwind and it's benefits and best practises. (Should be at least)
Why do you think this example is supposed to be the pinnacle of what the most performance and optimized tailwind can be?
- There are useless empty elements in the tailwind example - There are so many different breakpoints, paddings and margins in the depths of the tailwind DOM, that can not be achieved with the minified semantic markup as it is simply lacking the DOM structure necessary for it. Substituting just html > body > header > nav > a with html > body > div > div> header > div > div ... just isn't a correct comparison. It's like comparing airplanes to cars. - There are data sttributes such as data-new-gr-c-s-check-loaded or data-headlessui-state. Also, totally unrelated to the semantic markup comparison.
This is just bloated asf.
Do you even know what semantic markup is? Maybe some people are just stubborn and try to find anything against tailwind because they just don't like it.