> Is Svelte and in extension SvelteKit somehow the next step in the evolution of frontend frameworks?

I personally would say no. I like Svelte's dev experience but I don't like the output code and while it has smaller invalidation subsections than a full component there's not a 1 to 1 mapping between a piece of data changed and the exact piece of DOM getting updated.

> Or has the approach of Svelte also drawbacks that I am not aware of?

Svelte is superb for producing NYT infographics and other relatively lightweight experiences. I work on interface builders and when you're scaling up the number of components on a page and the complexity then having the reactivity code repeated in the components instead of shared in a library becomes a drawback. What pushed me off of of Svelte was a ~500 loc component that had ~40 reactions and resulted in a 4.1k LoC js file output. I looked through the output and didn't see any particularly egregious mis-compilations, just that the Svelte's approach resulted in verbose outputs. I don't think most people will have components this complex so I don't think Svelte is a bad choice and I do like the DX but that caused me to move on.

Of the current options, I recommend Solid. It has fine grained reactivity all the way down, better perf, similar bundle size, and the community is generally performance obsessed. They're currently experimenting with islands/partial hydration/mixed server+client rendering and preliminary results are halving the delivered JS. As an example, their movies demo [1] is ~15k.

[1] https://solid-movies.dev/