> Lit was never quite so extreme in its worst pre-spec days

"pre-spec days"? What are you even talking about?

Lit 1.0 used non-standard decorators in 2019: https://lit.dev/blog/2019-02-05-lit-element-and-lit-html-rel...

A decorators proposal (and it was a different one than what Google was building stuff off of in 2019) didn't make it to Stage 3 until 2022 (and still hasn't made it to Stage 4).

This also contributed to the idea for years that Web Components were more complicated to support in non-Google browsers or without complicated build processes.

Lit has always supported plain JS ways of authoring components. Just because it also supported TypeScript and Babel decorators doesn't make it "pre-spec".

Lots of developers like decorators, we gave them the option. _shrug_