Why I still Choose Tailwind CSS in 2025

People hate Tailwind CSS. I get it. - "Your HTML looks ugly." - "It's just inline styles with extra steps." - "CSS-in-JS is better." - "You're not learning real CSS." I've heard them all. I used to think the same thing. When I first saw this: tsx … Runtime performance was awful. My JavaScript bundles were massive. Server-side rendering was a nightmare. Hot reloading was slow. The tooling was fragile. I spent more time fighting the CSS-in-JS runtime than actually styling components. CSS frameworks have tried every abstraction level. Component frameworks like Bootstrap give you pre-built components. CSS-in-JS gives you component-scoped styles. CSS modules give you file-scoped styles. Tailwind gives you design tokens as classes. I found that component-level abstractions break down. Every project needs custom components. Pre-built components look generic. You end up overriding half the styles anyway. Even with modern solutions like shadcn/ui, which takes a smarter approach by giving you the actual component code instead of a black-box library, you still need a solid styling foundation underneath. … Tailwind generates only the CSS you use. My final stylesheets are tiny. Most projects ship less than 10KB of CSS. Compare that to component frameworks. Bootstrap's full CSS is 200KB+. Even if you tree-shake, you're shipping styles you don't need. The JIT compiler makes development fast. Changes compile in milliseconds. The build step is barely noticeable. I've shipped production apps with 4KB of CSS. Try doing that with any other framework. … Tailwind isn't perfect. The HTML can get verbose. Complex layouts require many classes. The learning curve exists. Some designs don't fit the utility model well. Highly custom animations or complex graphics might need regular CSS *(Or Framer Motion!!!)*. The file size can grow if you're not careful. Unused purging helps, but you need to configure it properly.