> `m-2` can mean entirely different things, depending on how your configuration is set

Does it matter? Putting aside that anecdotally it seems very rare to override the default values for spacing anyway, m-2 is twice as much as m-1, which is whatever the baseline spacing for your project is.

Sure it can vary from project to project (though again, it doesn't seem awfully common for folks to do), but the config file is in your source control so m-2 is always consistent for the project you're working on.

It is super common things to do when you actually adopt it as system. People choose either -4 or -8 to be 1x measure of space and setup the size in config.

Of course there is a big group of devs who use tailwind for easy copy paste templates that never change the config. But those who use as system use config a lot.

I'd argue that if you use Tailwind as is, without creating a system of configuration around it, you're team issue isn't Tailwind. I fully understand what it's like to have a team that doesn't understand build tools, but you really shouldn't be allowing these people to prepare deployments by themselves. I think that's totally "ok" in our current web culture, there's no more looking at source code on a website and figuring things out that easily. It can become annoying to have someone come to you for something that should be so basic (in our minds), but I guarantee it's way less annoying that being called upon to fix production! I'm not even a front-end developer, I just kind of fell into the role because I know code and started in the late 1990's, and then picked it back up in the early 2000's. I get why CSS is difficult, but I think the patches over the language by libraries is still not making things easier.

The thing is you have to use build tools to use Tailwind. It doesn't work (well) without it being able to search your templates to generate css for the classes you use.

So anyone using Tailwind already has the setup to add tailwind.config.js into their project. They make it as easy as it can possibly be.

The reason why people don't change the config is that you need the default tailwind config for all the copy-paste-able snippets to work. People buy something like TailwindUI and copy what they find around. Including things like colors (which i find super stupid that the TailwindUI team didn't you know... use their own config OR css variables to be able to change brand colors).

And that kind of usage of Tailwind is lazy and you won't learn anything. But that's up to people. It doesn't mean Tailwind is bad abstraction or not possible to use for efficient design systems.

Just because a 2 can represent different values doesn’t mean there’s not a system, it just means the system is configurable. This is a good thing, you just have to know how the tool works.

Even if I don’t know what specific values m-2 may hold for a given project, I certainly know a lot more about it right off the bat than whatever .class-name you may have come up with from scratch, and can reference the config to know the rest.

You can configure it to use names like `m-xs`, `m-sm`, `m-md`, `m-lg`, etc if you want, that's the beauty of it. It lets you create your own design system.