Thank you, this is a nice post. On the other hand, the author is happy to have HTML and CSS generated with JS, which is weird as well (I know - React).
It has some good points (and vanilla-extract IS awesome), but it's also a bit unfair, eg ignoring tailwind affordances like `apply`.
That said, for learning the "right" way to think about and use CSS, https://every-layout.dev is hands-down the best resource I've encountered in my 20+ years working with websites.
Now, to be fair, they wrote the article in 2025, and Tailwind linting was only released five years prior (in 2020) ... five years is hardly long enough to learn relevant tech for your industry /s
The rest of the article seemed similarly ill-informed, with the author fixating on meaningless byte-size differences in contrived examples. However, he ignores the fact that Tailwind is used on some of the most performant sites on the Internet. He also ignores the fact that (for 99% of sites at least) sacrificing a k or two of bandwidth is well worth it for a major increase in developability.
With Tailwind you completely get rid of stylesheets: that alone is huge! There's a reason why so many devs use Tailwind: they don't worry about minimal file size differences, but they do care about massive savings in development time and complexity reduction.
You described a lot of orthogonal points and highlighted your opinions, more than pointed out flaws in the article.
I use Tailwind at work at a large company, and it's... Okay. Its biggest strength is the documentation, since most companies have poorly documented style guide/component library.
I'd never use it for a personal project though. It's fine to disagree
This is a pretty good post.
In general, I don't think `class` is a good place for styling.