When I write CSS, I most often do not want the locality of behavior. I instead want uniformity of behavior, hence "semantic" styles. Even the trivial light / dark mode switching is pain with Tailwind, when classes like "color-gray-200" are routinely applied.
I’d somewhat agree with you there, but I usually use variables for uniformity. I do see arguments against tailwind but find anytime I’ve tried to do anything else it just feels like bikeshedding on internals for the same end result.
Really what I want to see is beautiful TDD for CSS so that uniformity can be enforced, but I’m not sure that exists.
Variables are hugely helpful, I agreee. IDK about bikeshedding. I'm very used to writing React code that normally declares no styles for components at all, and having CSS that style components using 1-2 classes, specific to these components. Container components control margins, <body> controls general things like fonts.
It seems that what solves the problem is a good component library. "But I need red text here!" For what reason? It's a warning. OK, we've got <Text variant="warning">, it will be styled appropriately, and will look like every other warning in the application.