The ideas of svelte are great. It reminds me of snabbdom thunks and inferno blueprints. If you know the view code ahead of time, you could do plenty of perf optimizations since you exactly what changes and what to react to.
But sometimes I dynamically generate vdom nodes. Like markdown to vdom. There vdom shines. It’s a simple elegant idea.
I think svelte is exaggerating a bit.
React and vdom family of libraries are great. Svelte is great too. Not mutually exclusive.
Someone should write a Babel jsx transpiler that does svelte like compile time optimizations for react. At the same time still allows dynamic runtime diffing if needed.
No reason why we can’t have best of both worlds.
E.g., send an article from the server, formatted in EDN/Hiccup[2][3]. Insert it into a component in the frontend, and it's converted to VDOM nodes. No further logic or conversion required.
[1]: https://github.com/Day8/re-frame