I've just done a small project using web components. I didn't use the shadow dom at all (please note I have no idea what I'm doing).

This was after reading a single hacker news comment saying not to bother with it, after days of research where everything I read spoke about web components and the shadow dom as if they were inextricably linked.

I didn't want the styles to be encapsulated. I wanted the css to cascade in like it does everywhere else. I don't really see many use cases where you would actually want to style a component from the inside and not have the user of the component be able to style it themselves.

All the blogs I read spoke about exposing a styling api using css variables. But by doing that, are you not going to great lengths to recreate what already exists in the normal dom?

Am I missing the point?