I hadn't considered Preact, I always forget about it honestly. That could be a good compromise. Cheers!

I've been using template elements a lot recently to render products on my wife's photography blog. The product data gets loaded from a headless MedusaJS instance, plugged into a template that matches her blog's theme, and then dropped into the page. I specifically wanted to avoid reaching for something like React since the page load is already pretty heavy with the size of her images. Template's been pretty easy to use in that respect.

I haven't heard of it before, but it seems to be down after trying to visit it just now.