I work in the fantasy sports domain with my primary focus building league management/draft software. I am both the "designer" and the developer of the tools I make. And I honestly wouldn't describe myself as someone who is overly pedantic about "design" in general.

But you may be surprised how often (and consequential) something as small as 2px padding, or line heights, or borders, or... [the list is just endless] can affect the final product. Especially once space starts becoming an issue (or you care at all about alignment).

The components of such software as the above are not "cards" and "lists" and "buttons", rather, it's "rosters" and "depth charts" and complex tables full of stats that need to be sliced and diced in all sorts of ways. A generic library (especially the kind that loves putting large swaths of spacing between things) is just not tenable.

Tailwind completely absolves the issues of managing literally hundreds of bespoke components on screen at once -- none of which can/should be reused in any sane sense of the word. Classic CSS quickly becomes a huge pain for the above. It's just... simpler to slap all of the styles inline right into the element. It took me no more than 2 days to become rather adept at using (and extending!) tailwind. At this point I simply cannot imagine doing it any other way.

I'm now building a back office/admin part of a site. The part where designers are rarely seen. And boy, does Tailwind help.

Often the developers have very little choice. They're handed a spec and told "go make this" and what they make has to be pixel perfect. Personally I think that very very few businesses actually need to do this, and adopting this way of thinking is backward and counter-productive (especially when perhaps more important things like accessibility are not even a consideration), what I think isn't the point.