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by jermaustin1 956 days ago
CSS Utility classes are "faster" and that is the draw, but once they have been overused and abused, then you are either stuck with them, or you spend a lot of time cleaning the tech debt and rewriting the css properly.

At my current job, I work on a legacy application which is still actively developed and released. I spend a lot of my time cleaning up inline styles, styles that are applied via javascript calls, and style blocks on individual pages. I wish the inline styles would have been utility classes, because at least then they would be easy to find and replace, instead, there are "margin-top: 3px" and "margin: 4px 0 0" and "padding-top: 2px" and dozens of variations on that that had they just done something like ".mt-small { margin-top: 3px }" there wouldn't be so many variations and inconsistent looking pages. This company would have benefited greatly from Bootstrap or Tailwinds. I hate both of those, but there is no denying how easy they are to use and abuse.