I still don't get Tailwind either but I found https://github.com/seek-oss/vanilla-extract recently which solves the TS/CSS modules nicely. All the styles are extracted at compile time so no overhead like most CSS-in-JS.
vanilla-extract combined with Sprinkles is roughly comparable to the Tailwind software architecture, but without the default configuration out of the box. There’s definitely room for someone to come along with a default configuration that covers similar functionality to Tailwind’s.