[WA]

I get your point. I'm fully with you that it makes no sense to use React and write React apps if you can achieve the same without React. I hate the fact that many great frontend components only work with React, especially considering that React didn't properly support Web components for ages, whereas almost every other framework had no problems with them.

However, out of the box, Web components don't come with almost anything. Comparing React to Web components is comparing apples to oranges.

Lit is great, but Lit is a framework. Now you're comparing React with Lit. Different story than React vs. vanilla Web components.

[spankalee]

Lit is not a framework. Lit only helps you make standard web components that you can use anywhere *because they are web components*.

You could take a Lit-based web components a rip Lit out and you would still have the same component that you can still use anywhere. Lit is just an implementation detail.

[MrJohz]

Lit is a framework, that's the whole point of it. Lit is a framework that happens to generate web components, but the goal of Lit is to provide the rendering and state management necessary to actually write those components. That's the framework bit.

If you take a Lit-based web component and rip Lit out, you have dead code that won't work because it's dependent on a framework that you have removed.

You could take a Lit-based web component and replace it with a non-Lit-based web component and that would be fine, because Lit uses web components as its core interface, but Lit itself is still a framework.

[nikitaga]

> Comparing React to Web components is comparing apples to oranges.

I mean, yes, but you're the one making this comparison, saying that WCs lack reactivity etc.

Web Components are an extension of the DOM – a low level browser API. They are similarly low level. That's expected. I don't need or expect them to be something more.

I am happy that I can use any reactivity system I want to implement a Web Component. That's a feature, not a bug. Having implemented a reactivity system myself, I know that there isn't a perfect one, the design is full of tradeoffs, and I'd rather not have a blessed implementation in the browser, because it will inevitably turn out to be flawed, yet we won't be able to retire it because "we can't break the web". A blessed implementation like that would benefit from network effects just like React does, and would have all the same problems as React, plus the inability to rapidly innovate due to the browser's unique backwards compatibility concerns. I'd rather ship an extra 3KB and avoid all those problems.

[WA]

Fair enough. I agree with you. It occured to me that the comment I originally replied to that claimed "Web components are the way out of this trap" doesn't mean that you can't add helpers for reactivity.