[unculture]

If you're making a wholesale design change, you should expect a wholesale code change. If you're making a small change to a component that's the same every everywhere you should ideally expect to make that change in a single place. If you don't have that, that's a problem, but it's not Tailwind's fault.

Global defaults are a separate matter. As are prose styles / styles for UGC text because you don't know the HTML structure ahead of time - by all means use the cascade here, but for almost but for everything else you have two maintainable options:

1) Some CSS naming system or scoping system, e.g. BEM where you enforce proper naming and selector complexity limits (except in rare circumstances). This is extremely hard to do in the long term on a big project.

2) Leverage the component system / template system of whatever system you're using to make reusable components and use utility styles.

Using the cascade extensively on a long running project is a recipe for maintainability disaster - you will face a wild goose chase for the file you want every time you want to make a change, and then another wild goose chase for unexpected changes because your selectors weren't specific enough.

I'm also pretty strongly of the opinion nowadays that separation of concerns of CSS and HTML is a false separation - the single concern is how a thing looks on the page.