> I don't understand the cult following around Svelte. There's a lot of magic and complexity hiding in there.

What's new is old again :) People started doing React because they got tired of mixing languages for logic, structure and styles, why not do it all in JS? They got tired of that, so why not separate them? They got tired of manually doing bindings, so now that's hidden behind abstractions ("Hello 2000s templating magic"). I wonder what they'll get tired of next.