I don't use Tailwind anymore at the moment, but in my experience, it does not lead to shipping massive CSS/JS resources.
In fact I don't know about any client-side JS at all that is emitted by Tailwind (my last experience was 2.x, not sure if anything has changed).
Regarding the CSS size, my experience was the opposite, Tailwind output was usually a lot smaller than hand-written CSS.
I have nothing against plain CSS either though; but it's at least as easy to make a mess.
I think GP is talking about how, without the tailwind build step, you ship all of tailwind, which is unquestionably a lot of CSS that you aren't using.
Maybe if you use a CDN, so hopefully the user might have a local cache of it from somewhere else, that can be avoided?
Still though, tailwind is pitched WITH it's build step normally, making the author's point about avoiding a build step a bit odd.
Did your experience involve the (recommended) build step? It uses, at least last I checked, a purgeCSS step to remove unused rules and decrease the css size.
