I’ve messed around with tailwind a bit now, and honestly I could never use it in even a moderately complex site without some sort of “component” framework.

I think you’re talking about just serving a .html file for every page in a site right? Having all of your styles duplicated everywhere would be much more confusing than writing CSS (and having to invent one name per groups of common things.)

IMO it’s only viable if you can create your own components. Which you will also have to give a name.

> think of a class name

> forget what name I had decided on

I think that's not the problem with CSS, but with how you approach design. If you treat your design process as editing a document, and just want to "Ctrl+B" to bold necessary parts, yes, I'm sure Tailwind's better. But, I can see how it could be a problem with maintenance and collaboration as there isn't an agreed upon design language or a document structure.

I understand that managing multiple files and going back and forth can be considered an overhead, but that's a componentization problem, not a problem with CSS per se, and you expect to recuperate your losses with the time you gained when finding and fixing bugs. Otherwise, there's no point in componentization. You'd have the same tradeoff when writing JavaScript code, for example.

You'd encounter the same set of problems the moment you start refactoring your styles into Tailwind components.

Is this how Tailwind is supposed to work? I've never used it, but this sounds awful. How do you keep styles consistent across different areas of a website? Do you manually write matching styles into HTML every time you need them?

Are you programming on a phone?

Sounds like you're using a rather poor IDE.