I don't use tailwind but surely it has ways to standardize this kind of stuff?

Tailwind's philosophy is that you must not use CSS facilities at all and instead all their utility classes should be inlined into the HTML soup.

This leaves framework components as the only abstraction boundary, but that means if you're writing plain HTML without a framework there's literally no way to standardize your design system.

That and the huge soup of classes in DOM is (part of why) I don't like Tailwind... but that ship sailed a long time ago.

You can define css classes that combine multiple tailwind classes

https://tailwindcss.com/docs/functions-and-directives#apply-...

You can, but it goes against Tailwind's philosophy. It used to be explicitly discouraged here[0] (see this 2022 GH comment[1]), but now they just don't mention it.

[0] https://tailwindcss.com/docs/styling-with-utility-classes#ma...

[1] https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/7651...