Over the years there's been a couple of folks pushing Web Components very hard, and making one particular argument that has been grating on me: "tools like React are bad tools because they don't support Web Components".

The exact phrasing is usually different, but the implication is always there; Web Components are, well, The Standard(tm) and so anything that doesn't use them is reinventing the wheel and doing so badly.

And it seems like none of these people have ever asked themselves: *why* does it not use WC? WC have been around for a while now, and frameworks have not transitioned to them. Why not? Usually the answer is "because their model is not compatible with them".

And *this* is where things go sour. Because then the answer of WC proponents is usually "well they are badly designed then". And I'm sorry, what? Who made you emperor of design techniques?

If WC are supposedly a neutral standard, yet it cannot support existing widespread usage patterns, *that makes it a bad standard*. It means that your design is too opinionated, and that it's more like a framework than a primitive!

This particular line of reasoning is pretty much the #1 I do not like interacting with WC folks, because sooner or later it always turns into "laundering an opinionated framework design as a standard", and this is what kills agency. We need better building blocks, not an opinion cast down onto us from the heavens.