I defend Tailwind more than I probably should, which makes me a biased judge of its alternatives. So this post is me trying to write down the honest case for leaving, then checking which of the alternatives actually survive it.

Short version: most people who search for alternatives to Tailwind CSS don't need a different framework. They need to know which of four complaints they have, because each one has a different fix, and two of the fixes are plain CSS.

The complaints I'd take seriously

Tailwind complaints tend to come bundled together, and they shouldn't be. Pulled apart, I hear four of them.

The first is markup noise. A card with eleven classes on the wrapper and six on every child is hard to scan, and it's hard to review in a pull request when the real change is one class in the middle of a long string. This one is legitimate. Components help, but only if you actually extract them.

The second is the build step.…