[Cthulhu_]

I feel like I've been involved in quite a few projects like that; Some Guy sold technology X to a company, so now it's all hands on deck.

Over the years, one company I've worked for off and on (as a consultant/contractor) went from a jQuery UI library, to a CSS component library (which was fine), to an AngularJS component library, then some ex-googler (younger than me) swept in and became CTO or similar and Decided that the whole company should use, drumroll please, Polymer. Then Polymer 2 came around and they had to scramble to make everything Polymer 2 compatible. They were just about done when Polymer 3 came around, which did things Differently once again.

But I'm sure the guy made decent scratch and left the company right before things came crashing down to an even more cushy job. That's usually what happens.

[qaq]

Does Google actually use Polymer much?

[dmitriid]

It does: https://github.com/Polymer/polymer/wiki/Who's-using-Polymer%...

The whole idea of web components was somehow sold inside Google, hard. They even re-wrote Youtube with web components v0 which was almost immediately deprecated. And Chrome had to support it for years before Youtube rewrote stuff in v1.

[ofrzeta]

This is from 2018, though.

[dmitriid]

Since then Google has abandoned Polymer and now has a new toy called lit-html. And is now busy writing stuff in lit-html.

Last year they shipped Constructible Stylesheets by default in Chrome despite the fact that both Safari and Mozilla were against the state of the spec and the proposed implementation.

The only reason? lit-html was going to use it. And the justification for not hiding it back behind the flag? "Oh, our internal metrics show 0.8% of sites using them", which, at the time, was exclusively Google-developed lit-html exclusively on Google-developed properties.