I don't do JavaScript professionally anymore, but I've worked with jQuery, BackboneJS, lots of AngularJS, some Elm, some VueJS, and some React, but being the curious person that I am, in search of greener pastures, I checked out Svelte, by first watching Rich Harris' video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao on "Thinking Reactivity", then seeing the benchmarks: https://twitter.com/Rich_Harris/status/1200807516529147904, and watching Rich and Dan Abramov spar a bit over their challenges. From an outsider with no skin in the JS game, it is clear that Svelte seems far superior now and into the future...
1. it is a compiler (it's like comparing C/C++ to Python) 2. the joy of out-of-the-box animations that use the GPU in CSS (reminds me of the joy of using jQuery for the first time w/ it's OOB animations) 3. you can drop in any other JS lib (doesn't have to be in a particular JS framework ecosystem) and have it inter-op! This is huge! It's because it's literally like writing vanilla JS 4. no need to learn some new syntax like JSX (not a huge fan)
Just take a peek. If you don't like Svelte, so be it, but at least you know what it is that you don't like rather than turning a blind eye because you don't want to be convinced -- that's tunnel vision.
I was trying to decide between React/Vue/Svelte for a project I started recently, and after having attempted to build to-do apps in each, I landed on Svelte.