Without Tailwind: guess at what the proper class name is, use it where you think it makes sense, eventually find out you got it wrong and have to fix everything.
With Tailwind: defer decisions about assigning classes until you've built enough to see what the proper abstractions are, then just refactor out the repeated utility classes. There's even plugins that will consistently sort your Tailwind classes so that refactoring can be automated by simple search and replace.
Just write your CSS selector to target whatever you'd like, then use `@apply tailwind-classes md:other-tailwind-classes` inside the brackets.
This way, it's just a set of shorthand tags that replace the long-form CSS props, but it's still useful for quick design work.