.. aaaand we're back to where we are today. Pointless article.
By that reasoning any library is not a solution. Somehow people keep writing useful ones.
The article is saying the form is useful but needs to be extensible. Doesn't seem pointless to me.
Also, don't web components require JS, due to the document.registerElement call? If that's true, they've even failed to write web components into plain HTML. They're just gluing another JavaScript framework onto the web, the same way people expected would happen with prototypeJS.
Of course something that started as an application framework would have had "subroutines" and custom components. That's no reason to deride the efforts to address that now.
As for requiring JS, you are correct. A declarative custom element standard will be needed before we can have extensible HTML without script. But given that a declarative standard will be a subset, in term of power, of the imperative API, it's best to see what the most common used parts of the imperative API are before baking defining the declarative version. If you look up initial versions of MDV and web components, you'll see declarative elements in there.
Standards are hard and take a long time. C++ hasn't been haphazardly rediscovering decades of lambda expression use, for instance. Web components have been in development in some form for more than a decade.
The fact that the 'newest hotness' breaks your GUI each time is an alarming sign that something is very broken. Additionally you seem to be talking as if this won't continue to happen.
Your final point - I'll believe it when I see it. Along with webAssembly, in 10 years.
