Comment by JimDabell

> I just genuinely think WebComponents are a badly designed API that is weird and hard to use

This was exactly what sprang to mind as soon as I saw the title. I’ve been writing front-end code for over 25 years now, and exactly two things in that entire time have made me miserable enough to think about stopping: Internet Explorer 6 and web components. Every time I try to just “use the platform” it makes me miserable and I end up demotivated and stop working on whatever side project I chose to try again with. And I otherwise like the web platform! I’ve been building with it since there was nothing but the web platform. But web components kill my enthusiasm for it stone dead.

Even now in the age of agentic development, AI trips over all the same footguns in web components that humans do. It just seems like everybody involved has been adding to the standards with “yes, and…” without ever thinking about how it will be used by web developers in practice.