Recently used Tailwind for a quick and dirty MVP. It came out looking very polished (way more so than the cookie-cutter bootstrap look) and cut down the development time quite a bit allowing more time to focus on the important stuff on the backend. Worth giving it a try on a side project if you haven't.

Like you, I was put off by how crowded the HTML looked but got used to it and found it way quicker to update and kept the css file clean.