The debate about Tailwind CSS has never really been about Tailwind. It's about what you believe styling architecture should look like, and that belief tends to be strongly held on both sides. Since Adam Wathan published his original "CSS Utility Classes and Separation of Concerns" post in 2017 and then shipped Tailwind v1 in 2019, the argument hasn't cooled — it's just moved to different arenas. In 2025 and 2026, the criticism has sharpened because the ground beneath it changed: native CSS grew up.
This isn't a hit piece. Tailwind is genuinely the most-used CSS framework in 2025, with roughly 37% of developers actively using it according to the State of CSS survey. That adoption isn't an accident. But a meaningful subset of developers — particularly those who joined the Tailwind wave during 2020–2022 — have been migrating back to plain CSS or lower-abstraction alternatives. Their reasons are worth examining honestly.
What actually changed with Tailwind v4
Before getting to the criticism, it's worth understanding what Tailwind v4 (released in January 2025) modified. The rewrite was genuine. The new Oxide engine delivers full builds roughly 3.5x faster and incremental builds over 100x faster in cases where no new CSS is generated. Build speed was a real pain point at scale, and Tailwind largely fixed it.
