Tailwind v4.0 Fixed Some Shit, But Should You Still Bail?

Fuck me, the build speed thing was getting embarrassing. Like 45-50 seconds to see a button color change, maybe longer on bad days. I was literally alt-tabbing to Twitter between saves because what else am I gonna do?

v4.0 knocked our dashboard build down to somewhere around 10-15 seconds. Still not blazing fast, but fast enough that I stopped looking at UnoCSS migration guides during lunch.

The official v4.0 performance benchmarks show 3.5x faster full builds and up to 100x faster incremental builds. Our results align with the daily.dev analysis showing 10x performance improvements in real projects.

UnoCSS is still a bit faster on our stuff, but that's "whatever" territory now instead of "I'm gonna lose my mind" territory. UnoCSS benchmarks still look good on paper but honestly who cares about a few second difference at this point. The comprehensive performance comparison shows v4.0 completing some builds in microseconds.

If build speed was your main beef with Tailwind, you can probably stop reading. But if you wanted to bail because of the utility class spam or the giant bundle sizes or the complete lack of TypeScript support... well, keep reading.

CSS Config: No More JavaScript Fuckery

Thank god they ditched the JavaScript config nightmare. The new @theme thing is way cleaner:

@import "tailwindcss";

@theme {
  --color-brand: #6366f1;
  --font-display: "Inter", sans-serif;
}

No more tailwind.config.js vs CSS file confusion. I can't count how many times I updated colors in the wrong place and spent 20 minutes wondering why nothing changed. The v4.0 config docs actually make sense now.

One thing that bit me: the OKLCH color stuff works fine on modern browsers but if you have users on Safari 14 or older Chrome versions, colors just don't show up. QA caught this on some random old iPads we forgot about - spent like 2 hours debugging why buttons looked fine on my laptop but were invisible on their devices. Fun times explaining to the PM why half the buttons just... weren't there. Can I Use OKLCH shows the browser support gaps, and The New Stack's v4.0 review covers this limitation.

What v4.0 Didn't Fix

Bundle size is still garbage for simple shit. Made a basic landing page last week and even after purging everything, still shipping 9KB of CSS. For three buttons and a header. Feels stupid. The LogRocket bundle size analysis shows this is still a common complaint, and Bundlephobia confirms the overhead.

TypeScript support is still a joke. No autocomplete, no validation, nothing. I watch people using Panda CSS with their full IntelliSense and I get legitimately jealous. The VS Code extension helps a bit but it's not the same as actual type safety. Telerik's Panda CSS analysis shows what real TypeScript support looks like, and the LogRocket migration guide explains why v4.0 still doesn't address this.

And your HTML still looks like this nightmare:

<div class=\"flex items-center justify-between p-4 bg-white border border-gray-200 rounded-lg shadow-sm hover:shadow-md transition-shadow duration-200\">

If seeing that makes you want to delete everything and become a farmer, faster builds aren't gonna help.

Tried a bunch of stuff recently. Here's what doesn't completely suck and might actually solve your problems.

Panda CSS: For When You Want TypeScript to Actually Help

Panda CSS is what happens when the Chakra UI people get fed up with string-based styling:

import { css } from '../styled-system/css'

const buttonStyle = css({
  bg: 'blue.500', // <- Autocomplete, validation, the works
  _hover: { bg: 'blue.600' },
  borderRadius: 'md'
})

Why it doesn't suck: You get real IntelliSense for everything. No more typos like bg-blue-5000 that work in dev but break in prod because you fucked up the purge config. The writing styles documentation shows how autocomplete actually works, and the GitHub repository has solid TypeScript examples.

Why it kinda sucks: Setup took me half a day with our Vite mess. And explaining the syntax to our junior dev was painful - "why can't I just write bg-blue-500?" Valid question, honestly. The CLI setup guide is thorough but assumes you know PostCSS configuration.

Used it for: Admin dashboard rewrite. Caught a bunch of typos at compile time instead of finding them in QA. But the onboarding story is rough if your team is used to utilities. Telerik's Panda review covers the learning curve issues in detail.

StyleX: Facebook-Scale Overkill

StyleX is what happens when Meta engineers build CSS tooling for Facebook's problems, not yours:

import stylex from '@stylexjs/stylex';

const styles = stylex.create({
  button: {
    backgroundColor: 'blue',
    ':hover': { backgroundColor: 'darkblue' }
  }
});

What's actually good: The performance is insane if you're serving millions of users. CSS output is aggressively optimized. Meta's internal benchmarks show they reduced CSS from 15-45MB to just a few MB on Facebook. The official StyleX intro explains the 40% bundle size reduction.

What's a shitshow: Documentation assumes you work at Meta. Spent a full day trying to get it working with Next.js and gave up. The error messages are useless and debugging is a nightmare. Refine's StyleX guide shows what setup actually looks like, and the GitHub discussions reveal how confused most developers are.

Who should use it: Nobody reading this, probably. Unless you're building the next Facebook, you're solving the wrong problem. Tailwind v4.0 is fine. Perficient's analysis and the Reddit discussion confirm most teams don't need this complexity.

UnoCSS: Actually Good if You're Using Vue

UnoCSS is still a bit faster than Tailwind v4.0 and the Vue integration doesn't suck:

<template>
  <div class=\"flex items-center p-4 bg-blue-500\">
    <!-- Same utility syntax, better Vue tooling -->
  </div>
</template>

Why you might care: Vue devtools integration is nicer. The preset system is more flexible than Tailwind's plugins. Still a bit faster on our big Vue project.

Why you probably don't: If you're on React, the migration isn't worth it for marginal speed gains. Smaller ecosystem means when weird shit breaks, you're googling alone.

Used it on: Vue 3 animation-heavy project. Worked fine but went back to Tailwind because Stack Overflow has way more answers when things go wrong. The UnoCSS guide has solid documentation, but the community is smaller than Tailwind's ecosystem.