Having lived in West Richland before (in the Tri-cities, on Red Mountain, scrub and all), I don't think thats really true. Well, it is definitely sunnier than Seattle, but nowhere near Phoenix. It is more normal than special.
Barring that, 80%+ of the people in the PNW live near the coast.
Tourism board proudly advertises the 300 days of sun on big bill boards at the airport in Pasco, and the hot summers are honestly worse than Phoenix, as there's humidity
CSS is really good these days. Scope rules and the new selectors available mean you actually have to work hard to mess things up like you did in previous eras
You have to remember the biggest appeal of tailwind is that it throws away the entire cascade of css. The people that reach for it are choosing it because it offers less functionality, and is therefore simpler to reason about. I hesitate to say they don't understand css, I'm sure some of them do, but in my experience the devs that reach for it are the same who deride css and make statements such as "I have better things to do than learn css"
I think there's plenty of developers that are perfectly competent with CSS who still reach for Tailwind.
You're right that Tailwind throws away the cascade, or at least enables developers not to have to think about it (under the hood, Tailwind 4 uses pretty modern cascading features like layers), but people aren't reaching it because of a lack of understanding, they're reaching for it because as front-ends get increasingly componentized, the cascade becomes less and less of a benefit and more of an obstacle to be worked around, and something that gets that obstacle out of the way becomes more attractive.
I'm perfectly competent at CSS and... at this point I don't even look at CSS. I just feed descriptions of what I want to the LLM and it nails it every time. The result either looks the way I want or it doesn't.
I'm not universally pro-AI. I meticulously review every line of backend code, and still do hand edits. I review FE commits less carefully but still keep an eye on it to make sure AI doesn't go off the rails. But there's only so much trouble you can get into with CSS and the problems are the kind of bite-sized problems that LLMs excel at.
I don't think it matters at this point what you use for styling. If you like tailwind, the AIs use it just fine. If you like SASS, or raw CSS, the AIs are also just fine.
I'm not sure there's really a human job here anymore.
Do you store your CSS in separate common files independent of markup? Out of curiosity, do you run into issues with excessive token usage when you want to work with CSS?
That would be my gut instinct - you ask your agent to change a CSS rule, and your agent would feel the need to find all usage of that rule to avoid introducing unexpected changes. Does that happen? (I'm operating purely on assumptions here because I regularly use tailwind where changes are kinda definitionally local).
I'm quite versed in CSS but tailwind has convenient abstractions on top. It's like "why you need C if you have assembler". I don't remember when I wrote raw CSS last time. Even global styles I tend to express via @apply.
Don't forget that, in my opinion very positive way, it also normalized the concept of "uniform measurements". Every instance of `rounded-md` is the same on a site.
A bunch of people have already said this but I also have known CSS very well (being using it since its release) and even enjoyed it. Butt the moment I saw someone using Tailwind I thought, "I want that!" The idea that Tailwind is for, or rather only for, people who don't know CSS is very misguided. That said, I'm back to using vanilla CSS.
Having a powerful video editor you can grab any time you need to is useful in a way few other bits of software are. Sure, for trimming and even some basic editing or watermarks, ffmpeg works great, but there are times when having full editor ui is beneficial
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