I doubt the parent is talking about applying each of the tailwind util classes directly, but instead wrapping that combination of classes up into a reusable component to be applied around.
They're talking about the @apply directive. It takes a list of classes and creates a single class with those properties. Since Tailwind classes generally map almost 1-to-1 for CSS rules, it'd be easier in my opinion to just write the CSS directly.
I'm fully aware of what they're talking about. It's common usage in Tailwind to extract large collections of the utility classes back into reusable component classes which can be applied with a single @apply directive [1]. This being the case, this would not be a 1-to-1 mapping at all.
