[davedx]

For buttons, I think the 'blessed' way to do it is to use (react) components and have the tailwind classes encapsulated there. It makes sense; you have a layer of abstraction where the implementation of your theme is in the "lower level building blocks" of your components. (Call it a component library if you want)

I generally only use @apply when there are some heavier external interactive libraries that are hard to style. Like for example if you're embedding markup in your application, and you need to apply a set of styles to the markup it generates, and you can't do that directly in react because you don't control that part.