The problem with this invective is none of the points really stand alone if the first point happens to based on an incomplete understanding. Unfortunately, that seems to be the case here.
Using Tailwind purely at the HTML level is not the only way to use it, and in fact, this is only supposed to be used at the prototyping stage. it's a pretty standard part of the Tailwind workflow to extract class combinations into helpers that can be reused. If utilization doesn't even get to this depth of use of the tool, can one really consider the usage the tool to be anything more than an abuse?
Frankly, Tailwind was a gamechanger for the way I do vanilla CSS. It makes it really fast for me to prototype, straightforward for me to refactor, and I end up with CSS and HTML that is straightforward and easy to maintain. It is what I always wanted Bootstrap to be, which is the Rails of CSS. Now, there are certainly valid critiques to be made of Tailwind, just as there are valid critiques to be made of Rails. But in my opinion, many of those critiques are red herrings that boil down to abuses of a very useful tool. I always have to ask myself in these situations if the problem is the tool itself (if used properly) or an abuse of the tool.
True, before I learned how to use Tailwind and grokked /why/ people used it, I was suspicious and leaned towards the former. But that's exactly why I wanted to force myself to use it and figure out what everyone else was excited about, even if I didn't feel the same.
Of course, once I learned it a little bit, I felt the same way I did about Rails, which is that it's an extremely useful tool for a lot of jobs. It did not get popular by accident, or because "everyone is an idiot" -- it got popular because it solved a very real problem significantly better than its competition.
I would hope the author eventually opens their mind a little bit to try and figure out why that is the case. They just might experience the same a-ha moment that I did.
Using Tailwind purely at the HTML level is not the only way to use it, and in fact, this is only supposed to be used at the prototyping stage. it's a pretty standard part of the Tailwind workflow to extract class combinations into helpers that can be reused. If utilization doesn't even get to this depth of use of the tool, can one really consider the usage the tool to be anything more than an abuse?
Frankly, Tailwind was a gamechanger for the way I do vanilla CSS. It makes it really fast for me to prototype, straightforward for me to refactor, and I end up with CSS and HTML that is straightforward and easy to maintain. It is what I always wanted Bootstrap to be, which is the Rails of CSS. Now, there are certainly valid critiques to be made of Tailwind, just as there are valid critiques to be made of Rails. But in my opinion, many of those critiques are red herrings that boil down to abuses of a very useful tool. I always have to ask myself in these situations if the problem is the tool itself (if used properly) or an abuse of the tool.
True, before I learned how to use Tailwind and grokked /why/ people used it, I was suspicious and leaned towards the former. But that's exactly why I wanted to force myself to use it and figure out what everyone else was excited about, even if I didn't feel the same.
Of course, once I learned it a little bit, I felt the same way I did about Rails, which is that it's an extremely useful tool for a lot of jobs. It did not get popular by accident, or because "everyone is an idiot" -- it got popular because it solved a very real problem significantly better than its competition.
I would hope the author eventually opens their mind a little bit to try and figure out why that is the case. They just might experience the same a-ha moment that I did.