[djrenren]

> They are not even in the same arena as React.

This is 100% correct. I think a lot of the disappointment about web components comes from a mismatch in expectation between the spec writers and what people when they think "components".

Web Components allow you to make new HTML elements. That is, you can make new kinds of DOM nodes out of other DOM nodes. This is powerful, but the resultant API is still a DOM-level API, and not a full templating system like React.

On the other hand, because all these templating systems (React, lit, svelte, etc.) ultimately boil down to a series of DOM manipulations, this allows you to create a kind of element that can be plugged into all of these systems.

Custom elements are a lot more akin to the C ABI. Than a fully featured framework.