Julia Evans dropped Tailwind and documented what she learned rebuilding her CSS from scratch.
Her core argument: CSS is hard because it solves a hard problem, not because it is broken. Developers who reach for abstractions like Tailwind before understanding the underlying model are trading short-term convenience for long-term confusion. Evans spent a decade taking CSS seriously as a technology, and that shift changed how she works. She points out that centering, the classic complaint, has had modern solutions in CSS for years. The frustration was never the language. It was the gap in knowledge.
The full post details her actual structural approach to organizing CSS without a framework. If you have ever inherited a Tailwind codebase and felt uneasy about what lives underneath it, this is worth reading start to finish.
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