Large projects with many contributors is exactly where Tailwind shines. It prevents that ever growing pile of intractable mud that every CSS codebase tends to turn into over time.
>"It prevents that ever growing pile of intractable mud that every CSS codebase tends to turn into over time"
This is why the key is not having a seperate CSS codebase. The separation of CSS and JS is just a legacy of web development from the time before component based application development. At most you might need a common source of basic variables like theme colors. But essentially everything else should be scoped within the context of an individual component, and live directly within that component. Huge stylesheets with specific selectors and complicated BEM style class names just aren't necessary anymore.
I’ve built big sites this way too and it’s a small improvement over pure CSS methods but still much less productive and maintainable than the utility approach.