Bootstrap is so much worse because of all the nested CSS styles. One of the big benefits of utility classes is that they’re relatively isolated to one element (with a few exceptions like tailwind’s group classes). This has a lot of benefits like eliminating spooky action at a distance and making elements so independent they can just be copy pasted between Tailwind projects.

If you’re brute forcing Tailwind then you need to study CSS fundamentals. The vast majority of its utility classes are essentially 1:1 translations of CSS properties with some syntax sugar and DX improvements. Translating them to custom classes is a mechanical process even without @apply. There are even browser extensions like Windy that can rip HTML elements with arbitrary CSS to Tailwind classes.