Wanting to prove yourself isn’t a problem. It’s actually a sign that a developer is starting to form their own opinions. But it becomes toxic when the primary motivation comes from a desire to appear smart instead of actually solving a problem.

You’re absolutely right about typed classes and that’s how React Native does it. Writing and debugging CSS is hard for many of the same reasons that string-based templates exhibit. IMO the developers who push Tailwind are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. CSS is challenging because it’s a combination of declarative aesthetic UI and imperative state management. Choosing to represent that complexity with Tailwind guarantees what could have be a temporary ignorance into a more permanent crutch that retains the same faults of the underlying abstraction, tragically opting out of any of the benefits of embracing the system. Modern CSS is pretty great and learning how it works pays endless dividends.

I think you maybe don't understand what Tailwind actually does. The only abstraction is its "language" that is used to generate the list of class names you can then use to style elements, but that's not really an abstraction, because in the end it's not that different from using something like BEM and then having to remember project-specific classes. But with Tailwind, it's not specific to a single project. And you always have to understand CSS and how it works anyway.