A component level token would be if your `myCard` component populated all of it's styles with component-specific css-variables, e.g. "myCard-bg", "myCard-padding". It's basically defining the styling api for your component. If you have a new variant that needs to style another property, then you should probably extend your component's style api accordingly (by defining a new component token and providing the default). As I say, I haven't yet used this approach, but it does make some sense to me. It's also useful if you're designing components across tech, targeting other style languages besides CSS.

>Classes that appear later in a class attribute take precedence over one’s that appear earlier.

This would be news to me, and it doesn't look like that's the case in TW, based on some experimenting at play.tailwindcss.com. If there are 2 classes on an element with rules that resolve to the same priority and define the same css styles, the last CSS rule to be parsed wins. Presumably you don't have control over that in TW.