Don't use Tailwind for a design system (2021)

I love Tailwind and use it daily, have done for almost 6 years now and I haven't experienced any issue I couldn't solve

It certainly has never got me thinking to just throw it away or denigrate it publicly. And my solutions have worked well in a team setting - not adding any burden to other devs

This feels more like it's at the intersection of React-specific problems and lack of experience with Tailwind and/or CSS in general

I can see some of these problems being frustrating, but because the author seems to just be sounding off without much effort to express attempted solutions, I'm flagging because I feel like this is just anti-Tailwind inflammatory BS

Edit: Title also needs to indicate this is from 2021

> Even that this snapshot of code-UI is doable in Tailwind, at some level of those components you will find a layer with a bunch of classNames that you need to parse in your head in order to imagine the UI.

So he would probably say that @apply just abstracts away the problem but it still exists somewhere that you'd need to parse through to understand the styling.

But this doesn't resonate with me. This isn't avoidable in any scenario. Either you have a styled component with a bunch of css-in-js, or a bunch of css, or a bunch of utility classes. In all scenarios there is an implementation that you have to parse. Which basically means it has nothing to do with @apply and everything to do with css vs. utility classes.

I still love using it, and will continue to do so. This isn't enough to stop me from using it. Normally I try to avoid this, and abstract the repeated bundle of tailwind classes in a component instead (it can be a container component or just some useful utility component to avoid having to repeat the same group of classes too much). This can have its own drawbacks, because having too many custom components that you need to remember to use in given situations (which is effectively how most design-systems would work anyway) makes the codebase less approachable.

And even still, we'll end up using the above trick (referencing a group of classes bundled into a property of an object somewhere else) from time to time, as well as the obvious option of just repeating classes as necessary. Referencing classes from an imported object is annoying too, because it breaks intellisense.

I'm honestly not sure what a better solution is though, because Tailwind has really sped things up for me compared to CSS/Sass/Chakra/Material.

You don't need the month, the HNconvention just uses the year in parens and some things rely on that format.