I just ducked all that, and started writing a plain old CSS with BEM like a mad man, and know what with a bit of discipline and good methodology it works as magic.
Yeah I'm with you in that plain old CSS is still perfectly good. Now with CSS modules and constructable stylesheets it's getting better to make isolated components too.
I think a lot of the love for tailwind are people finally getting the mental OK to remove the strict isolation of style and template/code which has been dogma for 20+ years. If you're using something like vue, svelte, or a good web components library you can just define components with all their markup and style in one place, all using bog standard CSS. It's fine.
