Creator of Shoelace [0] here. As someone who’s built multiple design systems and component libraries, I assure you that unstyled (or “headless”) components are often much more time consuming and painful to adopt than those with good default styles.
That said, I commonly find that most folks don’t want unstyled components because it’s quite a bit of work to style every single state of every single component. Most people just won’t do it or, if they try, they don’t do it right and they don’t do it completely.
What many folks do want are components that have simple, generic styles you can quickly tweak to match your site/app using a skill you already know: CSS. (This is something you can do with Shoelace’s 50+ web components already, but we’re working to make it even easier with additional CSS custom properties.)