Yeah it's turning the crank another half turn. It's insane to me how the webdev ecosystem keeps reinventing itself over and over and over again, trying to solve their previous mistakes without ever reflecting on and learning from why those issues existed in the first place.

I'd say otherwise, it's not circular at all, it's a clean design that uses Tailwind at a low level and builds a high level on top of it.

Again, that's just Bootstrap with extra steps.

It's not a full circle, because you don't end up back where you started. Inline styles have many well-known missing features, like pseudo-classes and media queries.

Don’t forget it adds the “feature” of a build step that literally greps the source code to see which style shortcuts you used, or seemed to use, so it can render them into CSS definitions so they can be turned back into inline styles.

And why is that a bad thing? It might be the case that bgcolor and cellpadding stopped being used because they didn't support media queries for example, not because they were inline styles.

There was a 10 to 15 year gap between people ditching bgcolor and cellpadding for CSS1 and widespread browser support for CSS3 media queries (2011, when IE9 got support and Chrome broke 25% market share). So I strongly disagree that the migration was about media query support.