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4 min read14 hours ago

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“Tailwind is dead.”

“JavaScript fatigue.”

“Framework XYZ is the new jQuery.”

We announce the end of things the way earlier generations announced comets — loudly, confidently, and usually wrong about the date or impact of the inevitable doomsday. (Ohhh nooo!)

Every few years, frontend collectively gathers around a campfire, points at a tool, and declares: “This one won’t survive the winter.” Sometimes we’re right. Mostly, we’re just bored — *or quietly trying to create job security *— as we feed that deep fear of becoming irrelevant in an industry that is slowly transitioning into AI-assisted and AI-generated codebases. We recognize the need to continually adapt to the industry’s evolving landscape. We also know we need to be better engineers than machine learning algorithms — not by typing faster, but by thinking more clearly.

So when I hear “Tailwind is dying,” my first reaction isn’t panic.

It’s déjà vu.

Tailwind isn’t dying the way technologies typically do. There’s no dramatic collapse. No mass exodus. No great unstyling of the web. If you watch closely, what’s happening is quieter. More interesting.

And far more expensive to ignore.

Tailwind didn’t win because utility classes are beautiful. It won because they figured out how to be ruthlessly clear by eliminating ambiguity, punishing inconsistency, and replacing vague team agreements with mechanical constraints. And in the wild west of frontend architecture, constraints scale better than blind trust.

Adam Wathan’s argument that HTML and CSS are already one concern wasn’t a hot take. It was a mirror. It reflected back a decade of architectural theater and quietly asked, “Is this actually helping you ship?”

“Separation of concerns isn’t the right way to think about the relationship between HTML and CSS.”

*— Adam Wathan, *Tailwind CSS: It Looks Awful, and It Works

For a long time, the answer was no. Tailwind fixed that. Brutally, effectively, and at scale. Which is why it didn’t just become popular — it became a load-bearing tool, refusing to disappear and making its presence known across modern codebases. Load-bearing tools quietly reshape the environment until they’re absorbed.

The Pain You Feel Is a Maturity Curve.

Every meaningful shift in frontend has followed the same arc. First, we fight over syntax, argue about ergonomics, and eventually, we realize the argument was never about either.

• React wasn’t about JSX.
• Tailwind wasn’t about utilities.
• They were about moving the point of leverage.

What the best contributors in this space consistently emphasize — sometimes explicitly, sometimes not — is the same conclusion: the future belongs to systems that reduce ambiguity, not increase expressiveness.

Adam Wathan discusses constraints because they scale, Josh Comeau talks about tradeoffs because ergonomics compound, Kent C. Dodds talks about pragmatism because shipping beats ideology, and Josh Comeau frames this tension clearly:

“Every solution is a bundle of tradeoffs. The trick is choosing which problems you want to have.”

—Josh W. Comeau

Kent C. Dodds echoes the same principle from the trenches:

“I’m not interested in dogma. I’m interested in what helps teams ship and maintain software.”

*— *Kent C. Dodds

These aren’t competing philosophies; they’re different angles on the same truth. Our sweet, sweet frontend is growing up — and finally becoming an adult.

The Positive Outcome No One Is Talking About

Here’s the optimistic spin of the moment:

We are exiting the era where frontend architecture is defined by how we write styles, and that’s a very good thing.

The next era is defined by:

• tokens as first-class citizens
• components as contracts, not suggestions
• styling as an implementation detail, not an identity

This doesn’t make the frontend less creative, but makes creativity cheaper to change. Design decisions are more centralized, refactors feel less like archaeological digs, and AI can assist without inadvertently altering the intent.

That’s craftsmanship with leverage.

The Real Growth Happens Now

So no — this isn’t the death of Tailwind.

It’s the moment frontend stops anchoring its identity to tools and starts anchoring it to adaptability.

The teams that grow won’t be the ones who picked the “right” framework. They’ll be the ones who built systems that expect change, absorb it, and keep moving — because the architecture itself is flexible by design.

And if frontend culture loves death announcements, it’s only because we haven’t learned how to celebrate the quieter thing that comes after:

A field that finally grasps what matters and has the confidence to let the rest go.

Zoë Hall Frontend Architect ZoeHall.dev Linkedin