You should really try some of the modern alternatives. Don't let Angular and React's templating systems poison you, give Svelte a try!

Even just plain JavaScript is much better and more powerful and easier to use than XSLT. There are many JavaScript libraries to help you with templates. Is there even any such thing as an XSLT library?

Is there some reason you would prefer to use XSLT than JavaScript? You can much more easily get a job yourself or hire developers who know JavaScript. Can you say the same thing for XSLT, and would anyone in their right mind hire somebody who knows XSLT but refuses to use JavaScript?

XSLT is so clumsy and hard to modularize, only good for messy spaghetti monoliths, no good for components and libraries and modules and frameworks, or any form of abstraction.

And then there's debugging. Does a good XSLT debugger even exist? Can it hold a candle to all the off-the-shelf built-in JavaScript debuggers that every browser includes? How do you even debug and trace through your XSLT?

I think the fundamental disconnect here is that you're assuming that I am a developer. I'm not, I'm a lousy developer. It's not for lack of trying, programming just doesn't click for me in the way that makes learning it an enjoyable process.

XSLT is a good middle ground that gave me just enough rope to do some fun transformations and put up some pages on the internet without having to set up a dev environment or learn a 'real' programming language

As for the lack of libraries. Technically they are possible, but are not used that often. Maybe they are not that necessary. XML's idea is a federation of notations. Each notations is semantic, that is it makes only specific distinctions. XSLT transforms between two such notations. Since each combination is unique, there is little to reuse. Where other tools use libraries XSLT uses separate stylesheets and just rearranges them differently.

In Saxon you write templates that give you partial results and just call them with the -it:name switch. So if you have a four-step transform you can examine the results of each step in isolation. In libxslt that only supports 1.0 you can do this with parameters, although this is less convenient.

You can trace with xsl:message. Step-by-step debug is not there, granted; but it is definitely the last resort tool even when it is available.

It is always correct to tell someone they are wrong for liking something, and doing so is how we keep HN great.