One of my favorite quotes coming out of the Svelte team with respect to runes[0]:

    > Like every other framework, we’ve come to the realisation that Knockout was right all along.
    >
    > Svelte 5’s reactivity is powered by signals, which are essentially what Knockout was doing in 2010. 

(Knockout was fantastic and easy to adopt because it felt like it "closed the loop" with events and simply made them more ergonomic to use)

The problem is actually React hooks which has created a paradigm that inverts this and is now the most dominant model. This inversion of the model of how reactivity works is the root cause of most of the pain and complexity with React.

[0] https://svelte.dev/blog/runes#Signal-boost