The reason react sites are bloated is because there are a lot of things that are easy to do once you have better DX, there is nothing stopping you from making completely static sites with no js (solid-js 2.0 has a whole "htmx-like" mode that lets you have good interactivity even with js disabled).

WebComponents are useful for cases where you want something slightly more integrated than an iframe or want to make a library of small widgets

Oh great, so where does DOM provide that function?

    function html(strings, ...values) {
      let result = strings[0];
      for (let i = 0; i < values.length; i++) {
        result += escapeHtml(values[i]);
        result += strings[i + 1];
      }
      return result;
    }