"Compression" doesn't solve change management, where you need to consistently change together things that are meant to change together. Intead of letting them fragment, diverge in millions of tiny ways until entropy takes over your project and kills it.
Copy/pasting, which Tailwind is so proud of, is to fork, and never merge. Let's fork all the things. We end up with a bazillion little things and no coherence/alignment between them. Hello, second law of thermodynamics.
Quick detour: our universe is so organized, that inanimate matters forks, and animate matters looks at the forks and is trying to find ways to solve these pieces together into coherent systems by merging putting together, deduplicating, generalizing. Inanimate and animate are two opposing forces, increasing entropy requires no intelligence, decreasing it does. It's no surprise Tailwind promotes lack of intelligence by saying "copy paste bro, it's good, turns out". Because that's who they target. People afraid of thinking. "Oh no you gonna like have to name a class, that's terrible". Woah woah... rocket engineering territory here!
For those starting to get back to their senses... they added @apply. But @apply is by Tailwind's own admission "like using CSS". I'd add it's like using CSS but with 1/1000 the capability, unclear/surprising precedence, and tons of extra steps/indirection, because... you could've been using CSS, simply.
And one more word about "compression". Do you know what you're doing when you name a reusable case and put it behind a class, function, package, module, library? You're compressing. So yes compression does solve issue of repetition, but intelligent compression (YOUR BRAIN) does this in a much better way aligned to your project's needs, compared to, say, GZip. GZip can't think for you. It can shrink things for transmission, but its only job is to shrink transmission. Your project still needs to evolve in time, and when you look at it... you're looking at the repetition, not at the GZip.
Or maybe I'm wrong, do you edit the .gz directly? Heheh. If so, I take all I said back.
But compression, in the context of broader space (your project, your industry, your target audience, coworkers, customers) and broader time (project evolution, change management, new requirements adaptation, changing platforms) is your job. The job of intelligence. The moment a computer compresses better than you, is the moment you become useless. LLM is a form of compression, because compression relies on prediction of what's next, whether it be what we desire is next (needs, desires, goals) or what is next regardless (outcomes, events, probabilities). When I tell an LLM "code me a modern site" and it does better than you (i.e. not using Tailwind, but with proper minimal CSS with well named classes), compression replaced you.
^_O