> So fork a sanctioned version of React or some other framework
They have basically done that by making LWC a pure ES6 implementation. If you look at how one authors LWCs, then you'll see that you're very much at home if you have worked in React or Angular using JS or TypeScript. It's basically, conceptually the same as those other frameworks and all your JS experience applies.
The difference is all the styles and widgets that make their JS library (called Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS)), plus all the decorators and how they work.
Here's why I think that Salesforce should be praised for the direction they have taken in the last two years or so...
They have completely revamped and sped up the Lightning UI so that speed is not an issue anymore. They have also flattened their authoring environment to ES6. To get this done, they have taken the bold step of dumping their old Lightning (Aura) framework for this new LWC framework.
That means if you're an enterprise who's invested in the old Aura-based framework, you're basically screwed and now have a dead codebase. But, it also means that no one has to use that old, crappy framework anymore.
And, here's the most important thing that Salesforce has done to bolster it's own ecosystem. With Lightning Web Components, if you are looking for Salesforce devs, it's now a lot easier to hire SQL-savvy Javascript devs who can adapt their React experience to LWC.
I'll chime in on the pro-CI discussion and leave the language discussions to "what's the best front end lang" posts.
I just got done revamping my decade-old PHP experience to full OO, and really upped productivity with the Slim framework to build a REST API for our app. I'm using Salesforce platform as the database backend, which is slow but I encapsulate all the business logic there. That's all cool, but, it didn't seem like I was hitting the mainstream of productivity.
Long story short, I'm on the Google/TypeScript/Material/Node bandwagon now. The dev environment is easy, and there's a wide choice of Node deployment platforms. I believe we can get the kind of deployment productivity we want with using a CI pipeline based on Github or Bitbucket that squirts commits to Google App Engine.
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