Co-author of Tailwind CSS here. Prior to building Tailwind, I followed more traditional approaches to writing CSS, like BEM. In fact, I remember when BEM first came out, and people hated it too. I've worked on small projects, and very large projects. I recently rebuilt a large web app using Tailwind, and my resulting CSS was TINY. I use Tailwind in conjunction with Purge CSS. The resulting filesize was 8.1kb gzipped (42kb).
> Tailwind and the frameworks like it are absolutely terrible at scale.
My experience has been the opposite. BEM is terrible at scale. You write the CSS, but then never dare change it, because you have no idea of the consequences of those changes. Developers end up duplicating BEM components for their use case, because it's safe. Which just leads to more CSS code. It's also worth noting that we're seeing more and more large companies move to utility based CSS, including GitHub and Heroku.
> Tailwind and the frameworks like it are absolutely terrible at scale.
My experience has been the opposite. BEM is terrible at scale. You write the CSS, but then never dare change it, because you have no idea of the consequences of those changes. Developers end up duplicating BEM components for their use case, because it's safe. Which just leads to more CSS code. It's also worth noting that we're seeing more and more large companies move to utility based CSS, including GitHub and Heroku.