And I'll happily use such a system once it exists but Vue/React/Angular exist today and have allowed a level of productivity, DX, and UX unheard of with what browsers provide by default. If browsers want to compete then be by guest but FF seems to busy doing next to nothing, Chrome is eating everyone's lunch and giving the middle finger to standards, and Safari is derided for not being Chrome and slow to implement some things (while being fast on others).

I think it's more likely to see some kind of WASM-based replacement take off rather than browsers get their act together. That's not to say browsers aren't improving, they absolutely are, but when it comes to competing with the existing frameworks the only answer so far has been Web Components and it was very lackluster IMHO.

Svelte is pretty close to this (at the expense of a build step). It gives you (in my opinion) better ergonomics that React, has no runtime and outputs sites that don’t require JS unless they do.

Sveltekit (its official fullstack framework) even encourages building apps that fall back gracefully for users with JS disabled.

Of course, none of that is to say that you can’t build bloated, badly performing apps in Svelte. Just that you *can* have the best of both worlds, even for simple/static sites.

All the things that "monoliths"[1] bring web components ate not bringing, and won't bring in any conceivable future.

[1] There are very few monoliths among the frameworks these days, and apart from React and Angular [2] most aim for rather small bundle sizes

[2] Out if the blue Angular just released version 17 with all the goodies you'd expect from a framework in 2023