ui-image-site-challenge VS lit

That is exactly my experience after trying svelte/sveltekit for 2 months. Loved svelte at first sight but soon their own invented complexity (and a very confusing error log) made me realize that I was changing React for something quite similar (with a bunch of different problems). In place of going back to React tho, I tried the next one in my list: Lit. No regrets, found the (powerful) simplicity I was looking for. Give it a try before getting back to React: https://lit.dev/

Shoelace: Being built with web components means this library is framework agnostic, however, React is the only framework that was entitled to get first-class support. It also has built-in localization, and the components were built with Lit. Keep in mind that if you want the get your component content in SSR, this might not fit your needs.

While I was able to achieve this fairly easily, the developer experience of manually stitching strings together wasnt great. Being myself a fan of buildless libraries, such as htm and lit-html, I figured I'd try to take a stab at implementing a DSL for component-like templating in Service Workers myself, called Service Worker Templating Language (SWTL), here's what it looks like:

This doesn't mean you are required to write vanilla JavaScript web components either. If you are familiar with using Fast or Lit to write web components you can include those libraries in you Enhance application. However, with the introduction of Enhance base classes for the light and shadow DOM you can get the same DX improvements where you write less boilerplate web component code while enabling the sharing of a render method between the SSR and CSR rendering.

I like plain Web Components (HTMLElement). It's actually really simple to build apps without any frameworks or blunders these days. I also looked into Lit https://lit.dev/ - I like it because it's very lightweight and provides the bare minimum features you need from a framework.

I've been using web components now for years and I will do everything I can to never write frontends in anything else. I totally agree with point 2 though: the Polymer phase was very weird, but, as mentioned, https://lit.dev is great and, imo, the perfect abstraction.

Lit framework provides a bunch of sugar that brings the dev experience closer to JSX

https://lit.dev/

The nice thing is that if you're using a library like Lit or Svelte, you won't have to bother with the web component API much at all. https://svelte.dev/docs/custom-elements-api https://lit.dev/

If you like the feel of web components, you might also check out lit which is a thin wrapper around web components

Web Components have had more than enough time to be a thing, they're still not a thing and the problem they were made to solve is not a problem anymore (Modules). What's left of Web Components is a JavaScript web framework called Lit with a contrived browser integration that cost them a decade to implement.