[wwweston]

HTML is content because it inflects content with structure and meaning. It may be fair to say it carries less of the semantic weight than the language and other media it marks up, but it’s content at least to the extent that punctuation is, and perhaps more.

I don’t know anyone whose concerns with “presentation” in markup included the presence of classes — the dominant understanding among people I’ve known who care about this is that classes are semantic in the markup with names chosen for that purpose and they have presentation attached in stylesheets.

Tailwind gives up on that separation. There can be some worse-is-better benefits to that, especially for teams that don’t have anyone whose role is to care about this. But the “ugly as sin” is a signal about the shortcomings in the tradeoff.