I (also senior fs, mostly SSGs and Laravel applications) had a similar revelation coming from componentized, precompiled BEM SCSS - I thought Tailwind was weird, verbose, dumb, and bad until I actually used it.
I got to the point pre-tailwind that I was abstracting most of my design elements out, anyway. (Fuck the custom form elements my clients demand.)
Tailwind just starts you at the point of "I abstracted everything" and trusts you to be DRY.