alexchamberlain parent
The first thought that came to my mind reading the DaisyUI website was "Is this an April Fool's joke?". I wouldn't normally post something like that, as it's entirely unfair to the hard work and dedication that someone has put into this. However, I think it captures my surprise by how smack on the nose this is in terms of the spiral of tech abstractions - this is exactly what CSS was designed to solve, and things like tailwind appear to be leading to people forgetting that.
Had the same initial reaction - have we come full circle to Bootstrap 20 years later?
But after playing around with their theme builder[1], I think there's real value here - you can quickly spin up a custom-ish set of Tailwind components. I'd rather it output an actual component library though more like shadcn.
The whole tailwind thing feels like an emperor has no clothes thing
I built apps for a long, long time without Tailwind, just using CSS, sometimes Sass. And I still do at work because our build system doesn't support Tailwind compiler. But for all my side projects, of which there's a few, I use Tailwind. It's just so much easier. I don't see how this experience is compatible with a Emperor's no clothes situation.