lit-element is a very light wrapper on top of the native API. The problem isn't lit-element, the problem is the native API is not that good, not ergonomic, still incomplete and so far removed from the modern way of building reactive websites, i.e. view = render(state)

You need some abstraction on top of the native API, working directly with it is even more painful. The fact I'm using lit-element is because many WC libraries force shadom DOM upon you, and only some make it optional (Stencil is one of those few, but the TS requirement is a no-go for my use case)

> Shadow dom is optional for web components

Not the OP, but slots are part of the shadow DOM spec, so if you don’t want isolated styles, you have to forego slots.

I tend to build my app scaffolding with wrapper components that provide layout and/or functionality to their child components via slots, so as much as I like the idea of WebComponents they’re a complete non-starter for me.

In the above stack LiveView doesn’t play that well with web components that render their own children, as it will remove those children when it rerenders. So you do kind of need shadow DOM.