It’s Time to Talk about Svelte 5

Since its initial development, I haven’t really talked about Svelte 5 much. To be honest, I wasn’t really excited of where it’s heading, but I wanted to give myself some time to accustom to it. And I think it’s time to talk about it, alas:

I don’t like Svelte 5.

Svelte had an appeal for small-medium codebases that preferred the simplicity, and it allowed for quick prototyping and moving fast. It excelled in an area that no other framework could beat. People had been clamouring for it.

There was a clear tradeoff with implicit reactivity and lack of universal reactivity, that the likes of React and Vue just scaled better for large codebases. Svelte 5 wanted a piece of that. It introduced a more verbose syntax, dropped its simplicity and what makes it unique in the first place, leaving its initial demographic behind. And I’m part of that demographic being left out.

I liked how any variable can be state, and you don’t really need to consciously think and plan for state. I liked how basic reactivity just boils down to $:. I liked how variables are one export away to be a prop. I liked how you can jam out code and Svelte will just try to figure it out.

I dislike how you have to always plan for $state. I dislike that there’s so many reactivity APIs: $state.raw, $state.snapshot, $derived, $derived.by, $effect.tracking , $effect.root, $props , $bindable, $inspect, and untrack(). I dislike that $effect, which should have worked like $:, is now discouraged. I don’t feel like .svelte.js is the right solution to the problem.

I don’t like Svelte 5, but I don’t exactly hate it either. I can work with any UI frameworks in general and Svelte is now part of that among React, Vue, Solid, etc. I just don't have a go-to framework to push and root for anymore.

I wish that Svelte would’ve stayed true to its tradeoffs. I hope another framework comes along to fill in the void. I also wish it didn’t vibe check those who had an opinion about it.

But I’ve come to accept how things are. I owe a lot to Svelte and the team, and I appreciate the work for pushing what they believed in. But it felt better for myself to speak out what I had in mind for a long while.

I hope one day I can be excited about web development again.