<el-dialog-panel class="mx-auto block max-w-3xl transform overflow-hidden rounded-xl bg-white shadow-2xl ring-1 ring-black/5 transition-all group-data-closed/dialog:scale-95 group-data-closed/dialog:opacity-0 group-data-enter/dialog:duration-300 group-data-enter/dialog:ease-out group-data-leave/dialog:duration-200 group-data-leave/dialog:ease-in">
This sort of thing is objectively ugly and takes a minute to learn. The advantages of this approach I found is two-fold
1. You can be more confident that the changes you are making apply to only the elements you are interested in changing
You are modifying an element directly. Contrast with modifying some class that could be on any number of elements
2. You can change things around quite quickly
Once you're well familiar with your toolset, you know what to reach for to quickly reach a desired end state
As someone that did a lot of CSS like 15 years ago when fullstack was the norm, then just sporadically for various non-public tooling, is that yes, the old ways of trying to position things really sucked and had a lot of hacks and some of those trail-n-error "how-does-this-change-the-elements-position" seems to still apply, but are much rarer now with grids/flex etc. But the structure of CSS itself is very straight-forward to me and has almost always been?
Is what's really going on that when people are trying to use vanilla CSS they go overboard with keeping CSS DRY? Which ofc ends up with an interdependent mess that's becomes increasingly harder to change. Just stop that? Start namespacing and copy pasting? CSS doesn't need to be compact.
Every non-tailwind project I've ever worked on inevitably devolved into a mess where you have 50 billion CSS files scattered all over the place, many containing classes that contradict and override other existing classes, often in completely unclear ways as it's hard to know in which order things will get compiled ultimately. As time passes, you'll see BEM done in various ways, you'll see cursed SCSS functions that generate styles dynamicslly, you'll see a bunch of !importants, and eventually you end up in a state where making a change to a legacy page becomes an exercise in dodging specificity and ordering minefields.
Meanwhile with Tailwind, everything is localized to the element it's affecting, and very importantly the entire team has a "standard library" of properties and patterns they can pull from, so you don't end up with people in different teams naming similar UI patterns differently, and you straight up never have to think of specificity ever again (which in my view is a boon, despite what CSS purists might say). Yes, the HTML is more verbose, but this is just such a non-issue after the first 5 minutes of discomfort, plus all the other benefits.
Hot take, but the Cascading part of CSS has proven itself to be a massive drawback, and not a benefit. Tailwind obviates that completely.