Inline CSS has a few HUGE drawbacks compared to Tailwind, but I think the biggest by far is that your devs are totally unconstrained in what they can do for styling. You're forced to rely solely on convention to not, for example, violate your color palette, or use the wrong border radius, or the wrong padding value. For a small app with a small team and no concrete design system that's not a big deal. At scale that is absolutely massive.
A few of the other advantages of Tailwind:
- reduced noise in the markup compared to raw inline styles, with the underlying styles getting cached by the browser
- utility classes can contain multiple properties that should always go together
- media queries!
You should learn what CSS is actually doing as well, but realistically Tailwind is, like you said, a pretty thin wrapper on CSS. Learning Tailwind usually just means learning CSS, with some different property names.
A few of the other advantages of Tailwind: - reduced noise in the markup compared to raw inline styles, with the underlying styles getting cached by the browser - utility classes can contain multiple properties that should always go together - media queries!
You should learn what CSS is actually doing as well, but realistically Tailwind is, like you said, a pretty thin wrapper on CSS. Learning Tailwind usually just means learning CSS, with some different property names.