Frankly, this has been transformational for our project and for our business. I'm completely sold.
One problem with the WC debate is people constantly compare the raw Web Component collection of APIs to a framework, when in reality, you'll add in libraries or extras on top of your Web Components to get similar functionality (like Stencil: http://stenciljs.com/), but you'll likely not build apps with them as much as you'll build components to share with others.
In that sense, the killer app for Web Components is actually Design Systems, not SPAs.
I disagree with the idea that Web Components replace your framework, however. They solve different problems! For Ionic as a cross-platform Design System, they are a major asset.
My read too
This isn't true at all, and it's a big misperception about web components.
Web components are pretty low level APIs that expose a few abilities that the browser natively has: defining a tag name, hooking into element lifecycles, creating an encapsulate DOM subtree.
Web commonness have no opinion on rendering, state management, etc. and leave other aspects, like responding to property changes, to existing features like JavaScript accessors.
It's expected that developers will use libraries to help implement web components, but the libraries won't have to implement a component model, or DOM composition, or CSS scoping. So they'll be smaller and more focused, and the overall product will be faster have fewer proprietary parts.
Would it make sense for React to start using this native web-component at some level moving forward, to improve efficiency ? Maybe another library will replicate most of Reacts features but is powered by this native (faster/cleaner) technology?
React is mostly about life cycles, propagation, and composition. The first two are orthogonal to web components afaik. The third has some overlap, but it’s mostly complementary with web components (once again, afaik.)
Also, don't understand your padding comment. Web Components are style-able.