If you are burned out because of tooling, but trying to recover, I do recommend throwing out tailwind and just use pure CSS for your styling. Modern CSS is plenty fun, there is no need for an external framework to do a complex layout. CSS grid is the simplest way to do layout even if you include CSS frameworks. Custom properties (CSS variables) are more powerful then reusable styles from frameworks.
The final peace of the puzzle is getting component scoped styles, which you can do by packaging your components into a web component and using the shadow DOM. CSS custom properties actually penetrate the shadow boundaries so it is a nice catch-all. If web components scare you (which is reasonable, they are scary) then there are other systems (as simple as class naming conventions) which you can use to reach component scoped styles without tailwind.
Do you have any specific suggestions for resources for exercising grid & shadow dom knowledge/chops?
I'm updating my CSS understanding after having left the front end for ~6 years (but having done a lot of front-end work for the previous 10), loving custom properties and am intrigued with some of the systems built around them (e.g. Pollen), trying to figure out where else I should be directing attention.
As for the shadow DOM, it is pretty advanced, I don’t recommend going there unless you really want to learn it. Using web components without understanding can cause way more problems then it solves. And at the end of the journey you get a very verbose system with a lot of boilerplate just to get component scoped styles, which is not worth it. But if you still want to learn it, this is a good place to start: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components
I've just done a small project using web components. I didn't use the shadow dom at all (please note I have no idea what I'm doing).
This was after reading a single hacker news comment saying not to bother with it, after days of research where everything I read spoke about web components and the shadow dom as if they were inextricably linked.
I didn't want the styles to be encapsulated. I wanted the css to cascade in like it does everywhere else. I don't really see many use cases where you would actually want to style a component from the inside and not have the user of the component be able to style it themselves.
All the blogs I read spoke about exposing a styling api using css variables. But by doing that, are you not going to great lengths to recreate what already exists in the normal dom?
Not really, the shadow DOM is an opt in choice for that reason. Only a subset of cases do you actually want the styles to be encapsulated. The shadow DOM is actually harmful for form components as interactive relations are voided if there is a shadow barrier between them (which has implications on both UX and accessibility; I think there is an effort in WHATWG to fix this). But when there is a usecase, the shadow DOM can be really nice. As you get nice things like component scoped styles and unique idref, among others.
> All the blogs I read spoke about exposing a styling api using css variables.
This might be an outdated advice. You are supposed to use a mix of CSS variables and ::part()[1]. CSS variables should cover the most basic styling while you are supposed to expose style-able elements of your components with the part attribute.
I bought Tailwind UI and am using all their components (or as much as I can). I don't disagree with anything you said but I do like the tailwind features and design philosophy.
I have completely ignored web components and need to learn all about them.
The final peace of the puzzle is getting component scoped styles, which you can do by packaging your components into a web component and using the shadow DOM. CSS custom properties actually penetrate the shadow boundaries so it is a nice catch-all. If web components scare you (which is reasonable, they are scary) then there are other systems (as simple as class naming conventions) which you can use to reach component scoped styles without tailwind.