Lit is a framework, that's the whole point of it. Lit is a framework that happens to generate web components, but the goal of Lit is to provide the rendering and state management necessary to actually write those components. That's the framework bit.

If you take a Lit-based web component and rip Lit out, you have dead code that won't work because it's dependent on a framework that you have removed.

You could take a Lit-based web component and replace it with a non-Lit-based web component and that would be fine, because Lit uses web components as its core interface, but Lit itself is still a framework.