I don't think you're missing anything — part of Svelte's value is in the name :)
Some other benefits that I like:
— Styles are included so you don't need a whole other library for doing styling. Automatic component-scoped CSS is great. You can also include whatever your favorite compile-to-css language is.
- It's faster than React because there's no virtual dom. I've run into performance issues a lot with React and not much with Svelte.
- Less boilerplate. According to this talk, React components translated into Svelte components have around 40% fewer characters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzX4aTRPzno
- Less JS bloat!* The actual Svelte library gets compiled away so you don't need to include e.g. the entire React runtime. *(There _is_ a crossover point when you have many many Svelte components where the bundle size will be more because each components has self-contained duplicated code, but my understanding is that it's pretty high).
- Use the HTML/CSS/JS/TS I already know. There's a little "magic" in the compiled reactivity system, but I've found it to be very minimal and easily understandable. I don't have to learn much to be very productive in Svelte.
- The interactive documentation. It's stellar. I can change all the examples they give and play around with things. The REPL is also super useful when asking questions to other devs about Svelte: https://svelte.dev/repl/
- Batteries included — Styles, animations, transitions, stores... all of these work really well together and I rarely have to go outside of Svelte itself.
And SvelteKit is taking all this to the next level with making Svelte available throughout the full stack. Heck, I'm making a SaaS boilerplate built on top of SvelteKit because I love it so much:
https://sveltesaas.com/Some drawbacks to Svelte:
- It's not as popular as React so you're not as well supported when developing.
- The reactivity system can be a little magic (for example you can't do array.push() to trigger a reactive update).
- You have to learn the templating system instead of just using the JS you already know. A little unfortunate, but I honestly kind of like using templates — I don't enjoy JSX at all.