Web Components don’t offer a declarative way of updating the DOM; it’s still `innerHTML` and using DOM APIs to edit the state of the live DOM. Backbone was a hassle to manage in any sizeable app because updating the view was left up to every dev to figure out themselves. React brought a declarative wrapper around the statefulness of the DOM, and that is the killer feature that Web Components does not offer at all. Vue adopted the declarative template approach as well.

The Web Components spec was written before React and Vue were very mature, and it unfortunately shows. Web Components might offer a better primitive for higher level frameworks to build on, but I would not suggest to anyone to use barebones Web Components over React or Vue.

It’s tricky to recommend them because I’m using web components at work and find the transition from React especially rocky. But they are native and standard, and other frameworks are slowly moving in that direction... I expect React will be the last to adopt them, or they’ll push for spec changes before they do...

open-wc is also worth a mention: https://dev.to/thepassle/announcing-open-web-components-5h7 - their guide and setup for using web components is over here: https://open-wc.org/guide/#quickstart

You can also technically start using native es modules in browsers, either localhost in Chrome 74+ or via origin whitelist with Google. Or use a polyfill such as Guy Bedford’s https://github.com/systemjs/systemjs/blob/master/docs/import... or https://github.com/guybedford/es-module-shims — but you’ll have to consider solutions for custom syntax, scss or non-es module dependencies. I personally think there’s a gap in the npm ecosystem which is building “source packages” that are native single-file es modules you can easily import or compile from with a native JS module system...