I've started using pure utility classes a lot recently (with responsive suffixes eg @m) and find this a really nice way to express simple bits of layout, type and whitespace.

I don't understand this at all:

If you have utility non-semantic classes that describe the look then when you edit one of these classes, they will propogate to every single element with that class

That's the whole point of utility classes, they follow the single responsibility principle and you would be incredibly unlikely to edit them.