[johnny22]

i don't know if i would have made the same choices they made, but I've been developing websites since 2000 (so before one relied on JS for anything but sugar) and I prefer to work with the component model of things like webcomponents, react, etc than I do with plain HTML.

So it's not just about "i don't know how". I just think it fits my mental model better.

[avmich]

Do you approach pages as applications or as marked up documents?

In those many cases when the page just carries information - it's not, for example, application-in-page, where you can change parameters and see the results - it's a document. A document is simpler than an app, doesn't need full power of Turing complete engine, and because of that, allows easier tools to manipulate - extract data, render differently (like for users with disabilities), modify (e.g., combine with another data set).

Sure, documents can be considered apps - a simple version of apps. There are also reasons to explicitly maintain strictly lower complexity for something which is not a proper app. For those, webcomponents could be overkill. Just imagine webcomponents with which you never use at least some of their capabilities?

[johnny22]

I don't see much of a difference if you're doing SSR though. It'd just mean not delivering code that never gets used. If I'm just showing documents, then that's what it is. It needs nothing else.