[abathur]

I don't mean to prescribe anything that specific (lest anyone reject the diagnosis because they don't like the prescription).

I think people are using Tailwind in roughly a presentation-attribute way in order to claw back some of the combinatorial complexity that comes from letting conceptually-distinct components share a namespace.

I don't mean that stylesheets are a bad/wrong way to express style for interfaces, nor that we don't want a separate DSL for expressing style. Web components are a meaningful gesture at better ways to manage the problem, but you still need a decent chunk of JS to take advantage.

(If you must, imagining how native HTML + CSS could support expressing components with well-controlled encapsulation/boundaries might give you a better sense of where I'd try to start if this was suddenly my problem to solve.)