I had the same feeling with Vue2-3 a while ago, I'd say Svelte is relatively similar in feelgood as both eliminate a lot of annoyances to create "leaner" components compared to React.

Out of curiosity, and I'm asking this as a curious React dev, what made you change your mind about it?

So far, everything I’ve had to type in it was code specific to what I was doing. And that feels nice.

The extra boilerplate that doesn’t bring any value to me, as a dev, when needing to update values at runtime. I find two-way binding to just be simpler.

Same thing for the components and their props.

But I also get why some wouldn’t appreciate having things getting "automagically" done for them.

Funnily enough, I've avoided react/angular/vue as much as possible specifically because I've _always_ felt it was fundamentally the wrong approach. When I first discovered svelte my reaction was "thank god someone else sees it too".

Over the years I've moved further and further from the web as a result of that belief. I still do web work when needed and as a result I'm familiar with vue and angular but I actively try to avoid knowing any more about them than I absolutely need to for accomplishing the goal.

Coming from iOS, with their Massive ViewControllers, and the occasional (usually half-baked) MVVM, it didn’t seem that bad at first.

On the contrary; components! Finally reusable pieces of UI! Try doing that when everyone on a team is hell-bent on their One Storyboard to Rule Them Al. Even if you did, @IBDesignable (used to preview components in Storyboards) would just crash anyway.

Instantaneous reloading! Even when it takes a bit of time, it takes less than 3 minutes. Pretty much instantaneous when coming from Xcode.

So, yes, React too was a pleasant surprise at first. The kind you get when you take of shoes that are just a tad too small.

The lack of libraries to work at a higher level, with more powerful UI components.

At the moment it's really just Material. (And that looks a bit messy on the inside)

We need a chakra or radix or?

I've been using daisyui + svelte and I'm pretty happy with it so far. It may not be as rich as some of the react UI libraries but the basics are all there.

https://daisyui.com/

That looks promising, and not stuck to a single tech (svelte, react).

So it's a tailwind plugin that uses apply to create new css classes for components.

Yeah the framework independence is one thing that drew me to it.

You couldn't pay me to write in another HTML template language like in Svelte or Vue.

Over Preact? I'm a little confused by your comment.

Not sure what part is confusing, Svelte and Vue have their own template languages inside HTML, I don't want to write another `v-for` or a `#if :else` instead of JS/TS.

Jsx is just js with a thin layer of sugar.