The analogy I’ve been using is that this is like jumping from a tall 130 kilobyte-story building (ReactDOM) right into the zero kilobyte sewers of web components. If you take anything from this post, please understand this: web components (most likely) weren’t designed for you. Not to dissuade you from using them, but they were purposefully designed to be a low-level bare metal primitive for library authors to build on; they were designed to be used with a library, a thin layer of abstraction butter on top.