Tailwind CSS at scale — when it breaks
Tailwind ships fast for small projects. On a codebase with 50+ developers and 5 years of history, the cracks show.
Small project: Tailwind beats vanilla CSS on every metric. No naming, no specificity wars, instant prototyping.
Big project pain: HTML becomes unreadable past 10 utility classes per element. Refactor of design tokens means find-replace across 1000s of files.
Solutions: extract repeating patterns into components or @apply directives. Build a design system on top of Tailwind, not raw utilities.
Or: switch to vanilla CSS with PostCSS for variables. Boring, scales linearly.