Once I discovered utility classes, I found it so much better than BEM or any derivatives of such. I don't want my styles to know what my components are, I want my components to use predefined styles.
I feel like utility classes and BEM go well together, though. BEM for sort of atoms/molecules (to use the lingo from the linked css-tricks page), and then utility classes to tweak the components, and to make components play nicely together (Fixing up margins, etc so things flow right and are the right size.)
