I have found some nice middle ground with Frankenstyle [0] framework which take some inspiration from Tailwind (and Shadcn) but with no-build, which is the thing that I found really annoying with Tailwind. CSS with a build process is already not css anymore. But I understand the feeling of OP to want a cleaner code - without sparkling style details all over the html, though overtime I do feel it really gets out of hand and in the end having the styling in the html makes it less complexity to manage which class is where.

[0]: https://franken.style/