Funnily enough, I've avoided react/angular/vue as much as possible specifically because I've _always_ felt it was fundamentally the wrong approach. When I first discovered svelte my reaction was "thank god someone else sees it too".
Over the years I've moved further and further from the web as a result of that belief. I still do web work when needed and as a result I'm familiar with vue and angular but I actively try to avoid knowing any more about them than I absolutely need to for accomplishing the goal.
Coming from iOS, with their Massive ViewControllers, and the occasional (usually half-baked) MVVM, it didn’t seem that bad at first.
On the contrary; components!
Finally reusable pieces of UI! Try doing that when everyone on a team is hell-bent on their One Storyboard to Rule Them Al. Even if you did, @IBDesignable (used to preview components in Storyboards) would just crash anyway.
Instantaneous reloading! Even when it takes a bit of time, it takes less than 3 minutes. Pretty much instantaneous when coming from Xcode.
So, yes, React too was a pleasant surprise at first. The kind you get when you take of shoes that are just a tad too small.
So far, everything I’ve had to type in it was code specific to what I was doing. And that feels nice.
The extra boilerplate that doesn’t bring any value to me, as a dev, when needing to update values at runtime. I find two-way binding to just be simpler.
Same thing for the components and their props.
But I also get why some wouldn’t appreciate having things getting "automagically" done for them.
Not sure what part is confusing, Svelte and Vue have their own template languages inside HTML, I don't want to write another `v-for` or a `#if :else` instead of JS/TS.
I had the same feeling with Vue2-3 a while ago, I'd say Svelte is relatively similar in feelgood as both eliminate a lot of annoyances to create "leaner" components compared to React.
I've been using daisyui + svelte and I'm pretty happy with it so far. It may not be as rich as some of the react UI libraries but the basics are all there.
38.2kB Minified, 13.5kB Minified + Gzipped, https://bundlephobia.com/package/alpinejs@3.10.5
10.4kB Minified, 4kB Minified + Gzipped, https://bundlephobia.com/package/preact@10.11.3