As far as I remember there are some attempts from Chrome and Mozilla but not sure I saw a real cross-platform spec out, so I stopped tracking the news around it really.
Can you provide some references maybe?
v1 shipped with Chrome 53, Safari 10 and Firefox 63. (And there's a polyfill.)
It's not "soon", it's very much "been in production for a while".
A base class like LitElement https://lit-element.polymer-project.org is all you need to achieve a sort of "react-like" development style (components with unidirectional data flow) WITHOUT build tools() and WITHOUT dom diffing! :)
() if you want to use npm dependencies instead of just plain files with a bundled version of lit, you still need to rewrite import paths, until https://github.com/WICG/import-maps becomes a thing at least. I wrote a tiny dev server that does that: https://github.com/myfreeweb/es-module-devserver
Where these frameworks really come into their own is when you want to create reusable components and share them outside a team. jQuery did a good job with their plugins back in the day but Angular 2 (and React, and soon native Web Components) so that far better.