What is the add-on from this library? The only thing I read out of it, is some css and other templating benefits. Which is not the essence of PHP. The essence of PHP is that you mix html and code (which many JS tagged templates support).

This goes more in the direction of component oriented development (e.g. what Blazor does... even Angular). So my rant is about comparing it with PHP.

Not a node & browser dev, but I have my past in PHP and currently some Blazor.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32961202

>PHP was already a templating language, but somebody got it in their head that there should be an iron-clad separation between designers and programmers, and that PHP gave designers too much power and confused them, and that their incompetent untrustworthy designers who refused to learn anything about programming deserved something even "simpler" than PHP, so they came up with Smarty.

>Then over time the realized that their designers were powerless, so their programmers would have to learn TWO languages so they could wade into the Smarty templates to make them actually work with all the extra code they had to write because Smarty was so crippled, so they nickle-and-dimed more and more incoherent programming language elements into Smarty, making it EVEN HARDER to use and more complicated and less consistent than PHP, yet nowhere near as powerful.

"No build steps, no preprocessors, no complex configs".

I worked on a project recently that followed this and Devs loved it. The DX was amazing.

Just unpack, set MySQL credentials, and done.

Respectfully, this doesn’t look anything like that at all.