I considered vanilla template initially for building my ActivityPub frontend[1], but in the end the sugar that lit-js adds on top of web components seemed worth the file size overhead.

[1] https://github.com/mariusor/oni

Author of lit-html here.

Yeah, Lit's tagged template literals and render() method are basically a shorthand for making a <template> element, marking the spots where expressions go, cloning the template, then filling in those sports.