I've been building for the web since the 90s and it's always felt a little off how slow the uptake on web components has been. Glenn Maddern's X-GIF talk at JSConf EU '13 opened my mind to expanding the browser beyond its locked-in set of HTML tags. I got super excited and started building with web components v1, but React was so dominant they never really got traction. And to be fair they had real problems too (not easy to create without something like Lit, complex async lifecycles, reactive frameworks really don't like other things having state). Around 2020, after almost a decade building Video.js and being tired of trying to make the player work with every single framework, I started building Media Chrome (https://www.media-chrome.org/) as web components. It's been out almost six years and if you look at the npm stats there's been a real spike in just the last year, even the last few months to over 1M weekly downloads. I don't know what's driving that but it's cool to see.

We're putting out Video.js v10 beta in March, rebuilt from the ground up and merged with Media Chrome. We're being really intentional to build an idiomatic React version in addition to WCs, not just wrapped web components, but I'm interested to see if the web component version is actually the more popular flavor.