hydrogen VS vite-jest

This acquisition is very much in the context of https://hydrogen.shopify.dev/roadmap/#first-quarter and https://github.com/Shopify/hydrogen - Shopify very much wants to move to the modern era.

And to address your point, it's not gaslighting to say that React enables interactions that would be essentially impossible if restricted to server-side templating. But there's certainly some degree to which trendiness and a desire to attract developers into their ecosystem is driving this as well.

I would say its main selling point is obviously the integration with Shopify. It comes with hooks, components and types to make it really easy to interact with the Shopify API. (They also use an XState state machine for the cart.)

Shopify's got their own headless framework for storefronts built on React called Hydrogen. Just recently came out of beta. Has a built in React hook for GraphQL queries to the storefront.

All the activity around V8 Isolates + "workers" is so cool-- exceptional performance, don't need to think about regions, and CDN-like benefits

Shopify's new store-builder thinks this way too: https://github.com/Shopify/hydrogen

Not sure what documentation you're looking at, because we have a ton here: https://shopify.dev/custom-storefronts/hydrogen

Full Docs and Image Source

Even the most official workaround, vite-jest, still has issues to work through, like a lack of Windows support.

I had originally planned to keep using Jest during the migration of CRA to ViteJS, but I kept running into issues, mainly because Jest support for ES Modules is still experimental. There is a Vite plugin called vite-jest but it's still very much a work in progress.

Then I tried Vite. Vite also supports lots of things out of the box (especially ESM!). Its HMR - hot module replacement is blazing fast. I can also use plugin like vite-jest (switch to esbuild-jest later on) to replace Babel and speed up my tests. This is the first time I have a relatively "GOOD" DX.