The two Github links the author lists at the top of his post point to the same issue and in that issue is a solution to his problem (use $state.raw).

I've been a fan of Svelte since version 2 or 3 because it was the closest I could get to writing vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, whilst also enjoying the benefits of a framework (and then using Sass and TypeScript). Fantastic.

Svelte 5 made me feel uneasy because runes are weird. After upgrading a project with it and working on another project, it's not so bad. I like that Svelte 5 disallows you from mixing the old and new ways of handling state and the error messages are mostly informative.

I see people in these comments talking about htmx and vanilla JS being objectively better and...no? For what YOU do, sure. Personally, Svelte is still a lot simpler to grok than React and for the people that care about benchmarks, Svelte is just as fast as SolidJS (I feel like the React crowd could pretty easily switch to Solid, the syntax feels similar).