I kind of hoped that Ember would ditch Handlebars for templating and move towards something a bit nicer. I find Handlebars syntax to be quite annoying and tedious to write. Kudos to the Ember team for persisting with the framework, I know LinkedIn is using it (and learned in this thread that Intercom is as well).

If this latest Ember release excites people, I highly recommend that people check out what the Aurelia team have been working on with Aurelia 2 https://aurelia.io/blog/2019/10/31/aurelia-vnext-2019-fall-u.... I have always seen Aurelia being similar to Ember, except the syntax is cleaner (especially templating) and is conventions based. There are a lot of similarities between the two.

One thing that Aurelia are doing in Aurelia 2 is an option to shake it down to a tiny app. The problem with frameworks like Angular, Ember and Aurelia 1 is they ship a lot of code to the browser and startup time can be quite slow. In Aurelia 2 they're working on quite a nice and promising AOT compiler. I really wish the Ember team would focus on bundle size, what I have seen with Octane, the bundles are huge.

My money is on Aurelia 2 when it launches in 2020, so it is nice to see Ember firing back as well, great timing given the recent State of JS survey yielded people are really frustrated with Angular.