I don’t really agree. You have curated colour palettes, so if you want a red, you’ve got red-50 to red-950, rather than an entire RGB colour space.
Similarly for font sizes, you don’t have to decide on a pixel size, just whether it’s small, large, extra large, etc. Border radii. Border widths. Padding.
There are lots of “sensible” defaults so you don’t have to pick even the units (should I use px or pt or em or rem or vw or ch or…) before we even talk about the numbers associated with those units.
The Reactoring UI book would find whatever structure of defaults given to you as very inadequate for a design system. The book is about an iteration process for creating your own design system. The Tailwind library happens to empower that design process.
But by default there's basically no opinion on what even a button should look like or how colors should be used on your website. You have to create your own abstraction such as "brand-color" and "brand-primary". You have to create your own design system, as there is no Tailwind default button or anything.
If you talk about a default Tailwind look people might be confused and think of ShadCN.
Just because you can build great things with Tailwind doesn’t mean it’s not democratising design. In the same way as putting frets on a guitar helps amateur players make better music without stopping great players doing their thing, Tailwind is the “frets” on CSS that make sure your hands play the right notes. You can still get it wrong, and you can do inspired or uninspiring design with Tailwind, the same as any tool.
Similarly for font sizes, you don’t have to decide on a pixel size, just whether it’s small, large, extra large, etc. Border radii. Border widths. Padding.
There are lots of “sensible” defaults so you don’t have to pick even the units (should I use px or pt or em or rem or vw or ch or…) before we even talk about the numbers associated with those units.