> And even if you just copy-paste the same class strings all over the codebase, transport compression will eliminate that pretty much entirely.

The client still has to decompress it and waste processing power parsing all the repeated text.

Premature optimisation doesn’t even fully express how absolutely ridiculously futile it is to try and make your website faster by having fewer CSS selectors.

It’s like my grandparents worrying about immediately switching off their LED ceiling lamps when they leave a room - meant well, but utterly meaningless.

If this was the case, it wouldn’t take several seconds to open devtools on sites that use Tailwind.

That is only the case for sites that include the entire, unpruned Tailwind Stylesheet with all utility classes. That’s a choice…