alt Hacker News> I think it's a beautiful, elegant solution
Very confused by statements like these.
They are extremely verbose.
They are too high level, preventing many low-level optimizations.
They are too low-level, preventing you from using/implementing them without going into the details of how they actually work.
They break many platform assumptions and conventions, creating no end of problems both for end users and implementers, and needing dozens of new specifications to fix glaring holes that exist only because web components exist. All of those specs? A heavy dousing of Javascript of course.
Even the people who push them heavily cannot agree on what they are good is and what the goal of them is
What makes custom elements good is inrerop. I can use them in react, Vue, angular, svelte, solid, or just plain ol' server rendered html. I can switch out the internals entirely for a WC lib, or not, with nobody knowing or caring.
This is a unique advantage to WCs. And it's such a compelling advantage that it makes almost all the downsides tolerable. At least if you are in a position where your component might be used in many places. Design Systems are a good example. The consumer can be any app, built on any technology.
And there are plenty of downsides. But they are mostly felt by the author, not the consumer. Similar to how TS libs can be very complex to author because of type level gymnastics, but when done right are easy to consume.
(I do not push them heavily, but I can appreciate strengths and weaknesses of all tools)