Do web components have a future if nobody is writing them?

With my previous post on “using the platform”, I was surprised that the comments on Hacker News and Lobsters tended to veer toward web components. This surprised me because I didn’t mention web components at all in the post. I was less surprised when I did some research and found that the entire “use the platform” mantra was first popularized by Polymer, which was Google’s early attempt at a web-components-based JavaScript framework. In 2018 they even called it “our motto”! So this explains why a lot of people seem to have it burned into their brains that “use the platform” means “use web components.” Now, one of the reasons I didn’t mention web components in the post is that, in my opinion, they’re actually not a great example of “use the platform” (regardless of the motto’s origins). I instead leaned on examples of HTML and CSS features that tend to be more performant, more accessible, and require far fewer lines of code than the equivalent in JavaScript. This is largely thanks to…