[Pwntheon]

I have a hard time articulating exactly why, but I believe tailwind is popular because it allows developers who are not designers to ignore design/css best practices and just write inline styles again like they used to, before everyone starting telling them that this was bad practice.

I had a rough road learning css, and have been in a few situations where my css/design skills were insufficient to the tasks I was expected to solve. Inline styling let me work more intuitively, and in large part skip learning a whole new paradigm/architecture "just to style some components".

As I eventually grew and had time to work on styling/design in a less stressful environment, I gradually got better at it. Not by practice so much as by learning a new way to frame the problems of styling differently from the problems of "pure" programming.

Had tailwind been around back then I'm sure I'd be a big proponent. It's a product that proposes to solve the cognitive dissonance for a programmer with lots of experience coding, but little experience designing being asked to structure and reason about their work in an uncomfortably different way.

I think tailwind solves a real problem, just not the one we're being told it does.

[jonwinstanley]

Tailwind is popular because it works really well for a lot of people. It's not about marketing or people being tricked by marketing.

Sure - it's very different to the old way, and takes some getting used to, but a lot of people enjoy using it.

But also people can still build sites the old way if they wish - that's ok too.