Indeed, personally I would never open a conversation with that, but I believe this is someone gussying up their personal hobby project where they learned how to use a CSS framework into a "real project" while they denigrate someone else.
If we're going to discard some projects as real, a pretty easy filter is "were multiple people required to build it". People who need Tailwind to provide their design system like Tailwind, but they are usually working on very small-scale projects they're unlikely to maintain and upgrade like a project with real users, real design, and multiple engineers would. And a pretty easy proxy for the latter type of shop is "do you have people who aren't even front-end engineers doing your design", and that commenter was displaying all those signals to me.
Anecdotally, I can tell you that Tailwind is heavily favored by shiny designery startups. Many of the best designed websites these days are built with Tailwind, and design-oriented engineers are reaching for it first.
Back in 2018 I was arguing against utility classes and vetoing their use in projects I was involved with in favor of thoughtfully architected SCSS. By now in 2023 it's clear Tailwind has earned its place in high-end UI development.
Your first example implies "The New York Times" uses Tailwind. Besides that being hilarious, you click the link and immediately see there is a big subheading "Events"
I have never heard of NYT "Events", so I checked out their page:
> Do you believe that [The New York Times Events doesn't] have teams with "design chops"?
Yes, yes I do.
Not really going to bother with the rest, you're joking if you think these top corps meaningfully rely on this 2-year-old CSS framework. I exactly believe that you're linking me to things thrown together quickly by a resource-strapped team, the "Events" example merely affirmed it
Edit: I sort of bothered
* GitHub Next - splash page
* Shopify - marketing page
* Google IO - marketing page
* Microsoft .NET - marketing page
* Netflix Global Top 10 - marketing page
* New York Times Events - extremely basic
* OpenAI - Attention grabber, but... the homepage didn't even use full width of nor center content in my 1440p display. Not exactly a UI-driven success
* Mashable, The Verge - Pretty bad websites.
This is my point. People use Tailwind to slap together something good looking and simple. They don't use it to build applications because you make your own design system for applications.
I agree. The main uses of Tailwind are people making template-based pages, or putting up informational offerings in front of service-oriented businesses which give people APIs to build their own apps on.
If we're going to discard some projects as real, a pretty easy filter is "were multiple people required to build it". People who need Tailwind to provide their design system like Tailwind, but they are usually working on very small-scale projects they're unlikely to maintain and upgrade like a project with real users, real design, and multiple engineers would. And a pretty easy proxy for the latter type of shop is "do you have people who aren't even front-end engineers doing your design", and that commenter was displaying all those signals to me.