💬 Plain CSS or Tailwind for small projects? I can't decide

I've been writing plain CSS for about a year now. I like my style sheets. They feel tidy. Everything has a class name, everything sits in 1 file, and I know where to look. Then a friend sent me a screenshot of his Tailwind code, and I nearly closed the tab. Every div had 12 classes. It looked like someone had fallen asleep on the keyboard. But he built a full landing page in 1 evening. A similar one took me 3 days. He didn't open a CSS file even once. He just typed little classes right on the elements. I tried it on a test page for 2 hours last Saturday. The first hour was awful. Then something clicked, and I changed a whole card layout without leaving the HTML. Here's what still bothers me. If I want to change a button colour on 10 pages, I'm editing 10 files. With plain CSS I change 1 line. Maybe I'm missing something, like a way to reuse the classes. I also don't like learning a whole new set of names just to write the same CSS I already know. Margin is m-4, padding is p-4, and I keep forgetting which number means how many pixels. My projects are small. A portfolio, a couple of client pages, one booking form for my uncle's clinic. None of them will have more than maybe 8 pages. No team, no design system, just me. Is it worth the switch at that size, or am I just chasing something everybody's talking about? If you've used both for a few months, I'd like to hear what annoyed you.

I'm the opposite. I tried Tailwind for 2 months and went back to plain CSS for my small projects. The class names felt fine, but my HTML got so crowded that I couldn't read it later. For a tiny site, the setup and the build step were more work than writing the CSS. Maybe with a team it makes sense. Alone, I wanted my styles in 1 place.

I switched for a small client site 6 months ago, and I don't regret it so far. Tailwind kept me from naming things, which was my slowest part with plain CSS. Your point about changing a colour on every page is fair. I fixed it with a few shared component files. At 8 pages, though, plain CSS is fine. Try one weekend project before you decide anything.