In comparison, Angular is a monster, and React is designed for the old browser capabilities, and is now staying around by inertia, not by inherent quality.
Its .html temples were shipped unmodified directly to the client (yes, including comments). Except they weren't actually html, and sometimes the browser would try to clean them up, breaking the template.
Reactivity was achieved through all kinds of weird mechanisms (eg monkey-patching arrays to watch for mutations). It would frequently resort to polling on every tick or break completely.
DI used TypeScripts experimental decorators, even long after it was clear that it would never become stable.
On the other hand, templates weren't type checked.
And yeah, probably they monkey-patched arrays and such, but that was just the way of the world before proxies and native signals. The cool part is Aurelia stuck to web standards, and those “weird mechanisms” were basically polyfills, so even old versions still run solid today, sometimes even faster by leveraging native features.
https://github.com/aurelia/binding/issues/108
> I never used Webpack
That has little to do with Aurelia, and Aurelia itself integrates with Webpack: https://github.com/aurelia/webpack-plugin
> The cool part is Aurelia stuck to web standards, and those “weird mechanisms” were basically polyfills
I could agree that Aurelia looks like you’re sticking to standards¹. If you don’t think about it, then everything kinda works 90% of the time.
But when you actually try to understand what goes on behind the scenes, like you can with React and Angular, there are just so many footguns, especially around composition and reactivity.
Even simple things like passing optional props² or detecting if a <slot> is occupied involved depressing amounts of reverse-engineering.
I’ve heard that Aurelia 2 supposedly fixes many of my issues, but I believe the core idea is beyond fixing. React, Solid and others have more powerful approaches that require fewer concepts to understand.
¹ Although there are still tons of custom concepts and syntax to learn.