After some experimenting I found that Tailwind works best with hybrid approach. The essay[1] is correct, that often you have one-of-a-kind blocks, like headers, footers, etc. that you can just fully implement with TW utilities, reducing cognitive load for class naming and structuring. But for more reusable elements, like buttons, links, inputs, popups, it's just much nicer to have them (and their variations) behind simple `btn btn-blue btn-small`. Even when using component-based approach, it's just much simpler to manage all those various states as explicit classes, rather than re-implementing CSS cascade in JS to determine how to combine corresponding TW utilities. I feel like if Tailwind Labs would be less radical in their marketing strategy, it'd receive a bit less of a backlash. Maybe :)
And I do agree, that moving to better integration with native CSS is a step in the right direction, very curious about future of v4
[1]: https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-...