Basically, these concerns are split in half now, between components and design systems.
In my opinion tailwind works out best if you use components or use template partials in a component style. In that case, there won‘t be that many places where you declare what your primary nav looks like. You just go into the PrimaryNav component and change the class.
In the other case you mention, you may want to use a semantic color name, which you can do in tailwind.config.js no problem, so your color class could be bg-action-300 or bg-red-action. Now this is not the same as some action-primary css class which could contain color, layout, an IE hack whatever. It‘s only predictable design system primitives like color, spacing, typography style, shadows etc. You can think of these like types in a programming language because they are enforced and predictable, not ad hoc thought up by developers per project.
Both of these things have emerged more strongly in frontend in recent years, so it makes sense that different things make sense than 10 years ago (semantic classes)
In my opinion tailwind works out best if you use components or use template partials in a component style. In that case, there won‘t be that many places where you declare what your primary nav looks like. You just go into the PrimaryNav component and change the class.
In the other case you mention, you may want to use a semantic color name, which you can do in tailwind.config.js no problem, so your color class could be bg-action-300 or bg-red-action. Now this is not the same as some action-primary css class which could contain color, layout, an IE hack whatever. It‘s only predictable design system primitives like color, spacing, typography style, shadows etc. You can think of these like types in a programming language because they are enforced and predictable, not ad hoc thought up by developers per project.
Both of these things have emerged more strongly in frontend in recent years, so it makes sense that different things make sense than 10 years ago (semantic classes)