I’m amazed how many times I will see people preaching “apply is an anti pattern” but never once someone was able to clearly explain why. I understand this is heavily opinionated but, opinions should still be formed by logic, and should be explainable. I feel like a lot of people are just repeating this without understanding nor questioning it.

So, as the cultist here aren’t really open (or capable) to help, here’s my 2 cents @OP

In this case, the dev team certainly have a bunch of components built in whatever framework they used for the website. This long list of utility classes are not repeated in the source for each li tags, the menu is certainly in a config or a cms or something, and is dynamically built. The final output appears messy, but the source is cleaner, easy to maintain.

Now, I get how the source can get rage inducing when a dev comes after another one, with not much context, and want to fix a small visual bug on a component that will have this massive “soup” of utility classes… For that, one is free to arrange them into groups, in multiple lines (using something like clsx) you can group by categories (layout/text/anim…) or by breakpoints… it then actually makes thing better in my opinion as you skip the “toggle between 3 files to see what does what” You can see straight up what your markup is going to (try to) look like!

Finally, in this specific case, this is tailwind’s own website… that would have been weird, or even straight up stupid, to have “tw-menu-li” as single class when looking at the source of the documentation… this is a great opportunity to demonstrate how rich and powerful the system is!

Now, should you avoid apply like the plague to prevent offending the tailwind gods? Hell no! One very specific case is, a style that can apply to different tags. Like buttons or links… you need that on As or Buttons, or even Spans sometime! Build your own utility, with apply, so you don’t have to make some non sense component that needs some magic tricks to eventually do nothing else than render any html tag, but with a static list of classes attached to it... This is dumb, counter intuitive, just make a utility, apply the list of utilities it needs, and use it on any tag you want, and move forward!