Especially true with the runes update. imo, it traded away the thing that made it unique and truly great in the market: the feeling that you’re just writing vanilla HTML, JS, and CSS.

It was a false feeling. 1) Vue already had runes, under a different name. 2) Svelte's old behavior was only possible with their dependency-tracking compilation step. i.e. not vanilla. 3) runes use proxies, which are vanilla JS, and don't require a build step at all, although svelte may still have them.

Honestly, I don't even really care that much which frontend library wins, and I've been mostly happy with React as a foundation to build off of. If the future is some Rust-based framework compiled to WASM, that's ultimately fine with me. Just as long as whatever it is is relatively performant and stable and doesn't add 1 megabyte of code to every pageload.