> Nothing in Web Components is forcing you to use ShadowDOM

Yes. There is just one thing forcing someone to use shadowDOM: slots. You can't use slots without shadowDOM or at least use something like this.children to capture the content inside the <custom-element></custom-element>.

But that is quite the important feature lacking.

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no_wizard 7 days ago | parent [-]

In my mind this has always made no sense to me, why slots aren’t independent of the shadow dom.

Same thing with how css is handled, especially since we have @layer and @scoped now

	▲	jfagnani 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's not possible to make slots work without a separate tree like shadow DOM. The browser can't tell what the container for a slot is vs what content should project into it.