I've recently just started playing with Web Components without a build environment. Meaning, no npm, no bun, no webpack, etc, and no dependencies; in typescript. Intellij can autocompile down to js and the browser view injects a small onchange handler for live updates when developing. So far no problems.

The only thing holding web components back seems to be HTML Modules; being able to link to a .html file instead of a .js file to import a web component. Because of this if you want to use templates or anything more complicated you need to do the ugly inject of .innerHtml = `<tag soup>...`, which I thought would be a problem but the IDE parses the template string very nicely. It would be great to make a component in HTML and any javascript you would put in a <script> tag. It seems like there a lot of bureaucracy involved in getting HTML Modules out the door since its been eight years.

https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/blob/gh-pages/proposal...