I haven’t seen this mentioned much, but Tailwind’s rise closely followed a shift away from runtime CSS-in-JS toward build-time, deterministic styling.

Many JSX-era libraries (MUI, styled-components, Emotion) generate styles at runtime, which works fine for SPAs but creates real friction for SSR, streaming, and time-to-first-paint (especially for content-heavy or SEO-sensitive domains).

As frameworks like Next.js, Vue, Svelte, Angular, and now RSC all moved server-first, teams realized they couldn’t scale entire domains as client-only SPAs without performance and crawler issues.

Tailwind aligned perfectly with that shift: static CSS, smaller runtime bundles, predictable output, and zero hydration coupling. It wasn’t about utility classes. It was about build-time certainty in a server-rendered world :)