Lit has not really changed direction or how things are done. In the release presentation today the exact same code was shown that runs in lit-element, Lit 2 and Lit 3.

That's the opposite of my impression using Lit for the past 6 months. A thriving community, well-maintained packages and libraries, old content most of the times works the same and it won't change after 3.0 release because the API didn't change. Besides that, the code keeps getting smaller so with a reduced interface it becomes easier to reason about.

Now compare it to React, Angular and Vue: the 3 of them had a complete change of course at some point and lost a good amount of documentation and ecosystem while having to maintain both for some time. That never happened with Lit (although it seems to have being created by the same team that maintained Polymer).