There's plenty of ways to manage the bevy of classes you need. First step is making use of components to deduplicate stuff. Then in those components, use a library like class-variance-authority aka "cva()" which allows you to set up complex named presets for your components (like size="small" or color="primary" and things like that).

The most commonly repeated point in the article is "escape hatches bad" and I think that's completely absurd. Of course you want escape hatches, otherwise when you do hit an edgecase you get stuck with no solution. That's exactly what would force you to throw away that approach and pivot. Tailwind doesn't have that problem because it was designed to include escape hatches.

Users deciding to use those escape hatches instead of sticking to a design, isn't Tailwind's fault.