I've always been a fan of state machines and have hoped for their adoption to grow.

Having visual understanding of state is becoming increasingly important for AI generated code you don't nearly understand as well as the human variety.

It seems many still favor store based reactivity state in frontend frameworks.

I contribute to it being the default so why change and because libraries like xstate are far more difficult to learn the syntax and are more verbose. But with AI that's hardly an issue, so I wonder if there is more to it I don't see and we just haven't seen the state chart reach it's peak yet.

The next version of XState will be much more ergonomic, with a reduced API surface area, lower learning curve, and much easier for devs (and agents) to author.

But at the same time, frontier models are very good at writing XState.