The exact problem is the 99% of people who DON’T do this and their markup ends up a Frankenstein’s monstrosity. I don’t know if it’s the new crop of front-end “developers” who don’t know the very basics or just hipsters being hipsters and YOLO all the things. Tailwind (IMHO) promotes bad practices and needs to explicitly state that you SHOULD use @apply or a puppy somewhere will die.
I've only started using Tailwind specifically in the last year or so, but I've been using functional CSS for about 6 years.
I don't believe using @apply is a maintainable approach. A better approach is to use view templates. In fact Adam Wathan recommends this way too in this video https://youtu.be/J_7_mnFSLDg
I think you can blame compilation time for that. If you only use tailwind utility classes, there is no need for recompilation on every change but with @apply directive and external CSS file, the thing gets compiled every time you make a change.
I wonder if they can bypass compilation in development mode somehow.
