I have a few hundred tailwind classes left in my projects after a purge css pass. If you have thousands you probably should start looking into extracting some components. If you literally have "a few thousand" colors in your UI you need to find a new designer.

And CSS variables are great but way more verbose and still require you to come up with "semantic" names for everything.

> If you have thousands you probably should start looking into extracting some components.

This is confusing component reuse with design system reuse.

Two components may have completely different purposes, but they both have a certain rounding, palette, and other styles.

@apply is your friend here.

100% agreed that sharing styles with @apply is exactly how to solve this.

However Tailwind tells users they shouldn't be doing this, encouraging them to paste the same mixins on every element they want them.

They specifically recommended using it in the documentation to solve exactly the problem you describe.