I'd say these days the support is pretty decent across the board, if you can limit your app to a relatively modern set of evergreen browsers (or at least - to the versions from "2 years old or newer").

I think it's more like "having less moving parts". In which they kinda-sorta-succeeded, except that the choice of bun seems misguided for something where you want broad adoption. And Tailwind is, by now, a product that is clearly clamoring for broad adoption (and achieving it).

The application is not packing the binary - it is the gem that you use to build CSS, and I _think_ it's only active during development, but don't quote me on that. In production there is a generated built asset which contains all the Tailwind-generated CSS classes you are using across your templates.

Yes, they run it - but for most it is melted into another bundler like PostCSS. The few of us who try to resist the "just use bundlers for everything and everywhere" do notice that there is now a bundler process firmly anchored in your development process.

And yes, being able to jettison a pre-processor for frontend things is a very necessary thing, and unless the designers have accounted for this (I only know of create-react-app having a "jettison" feature, and then - just) you are in for a heap of fun if you need to resurrect a 5-years old app with its dev environment.

I don't think CSS has failed - it's just a big and complex system for automatic layout. Automatic layout is hard, and if the age and power of CSS show us anything - is that it has succeeded. Comparing CSS of today to CSS of, say, 2005, is just night and day.

I don't think doing layout using other means (formatting specifiers? spacer elements?) would have been that much different, given that it's constraints all the way. The difficult bit is that the layout is not fixed - and it's a pain either way you do it, doing things well in InterfacerBuilder.app was also a struggle.

Yes, "center things" is ridiculous because you have to do it "4 different ways" with different tradeoffs - and there are some areas where things are still very painful (text-box-trim just now becoming available). But "failed"?.. that is a bit harsh.