So do I, but we were told that "open source is a gift", and I can only have opinions about choices made by others, not command them "do it this way instead". I am not the inventor, owner or maintainer of Tailwind nor do I aspire to be.
And as much as I prefer things be done well instead of.... like that... there are only that many hills to die on - and only that many people interested in my opinion :-)
I would've literally opened an editor, wrote a quick parser in JS, bundled it in and be done with the problem without going any further.
This functionality, if I am understanding correctly, is to grab all the classnames from HTML files and then pass that to a tool that includes those, and only those, in a .css file.
I'll burnout in no time if I spend even 20% of my time working on configuring or debugging the environment and the rest on the development activities[1]. I can't imagine roles where time is split 50/50 (or more) between "fiddling with YAML, npm, AWS, etc" and "development".
[1] I include requirements elicitation, debugging, talking to customers, etc as "development activities".
And as much as I prefer things be done well instead of.... like that... there are only that many hills to die on - and only that many people interested in my opinion :-)