I use Tachyons, which is also utility-based (and, afaik, an inspiration to Tailwind). The primary improvement is that the amount of CSS you need to write is reduced by 90 % or more. Okay, but now you have to write and repeat all these CSS class names, so what have you gained? Not having to write CSS is more than enough for me, but another important thing is that you get all the information you need in one place to see how something is rendered. You also get that with inline styles, but they are much more verbose (at least compared to Tachyon's short class names), and there are some things that you cannot do with inline styles, but can do with classes. But you no longer have to go back and forth between the stylesheet and wherever you are performing your DOM-rendering to get an understanding of what's happening.
Tachyons has truly taken a lot of the pain of writing web applications away for me. It looks kind of ugly in the beginning, but I can't imagine going back to writing oodles of CSS again. Haven't used Tailwind though.
I’m using Tachyons over Tailwind because not needing a build step appeals to me. I vastly prefer the smaller footprint of Tachyons, but I do miss Tailwind’s comprehensive color palette sometimes. I could always manually add it in, but for now I’m sticking to Tachyons’s default colors to keep things simple.
Tachyons has truly taken a lot of the pain of writing web applications away for me. It looks kind of ugly in the beginning, but I can't imagine going back to writing oodles of CSS again. Haven't used Tailwind though.