Especially since CSS now supports imports, variables, nested children and other features that have rendered the CSS processing tools of yore obsolete.

control structures? actual expressions?

I am not arguing for using sass, et al, but CSS preprocessors still have their place for those who wish to utilize them.

CSS feels just about perfect now. Any more convenience features and it would probably start feeling overly abstracted to me.

I don't disagree with the main point here, but the dev-dependencies won't be installed or run on your machine unless you're building Tailwind or Panda itself. They're not necessary for processing the CSS.

I know, but there’s something about having many hundreds / thousands of dev dependencies that seems like a signal of mindset.

How much do they care about simplicity, bloat, efficiency, security? The number of dependencies is a signal. Maybe not an important one, though.

None of Tailwind's dependencies ship to your production app. Tailwind is a CSS build system (mostly) so when you build for prod, the only thing that ships to prod is a CSS file.

Is there a way to install only your own dev dependencies?

As far as I can tell installing a package will also pull down all of its dev dependencies. This unfortunately leads to many typescript related annoyances such as jest typescript global types being pulled in despite not needing them.