> i have a hard time seeing solid as something more than “react but faster and slightly less annoying”.

Err, I'd have a hard time not to see that as a major benefit first of all?

Solid does have state management. Its state management primitives can be used outside components and can even be used completely on their own, and its stores are fairly similar to Svelte stores.

https://www.solidjs.com/docs/latest/api#stores

They recently released a beta of SolidStart, their answer to Next.js/SvelteKit/Remix, etc, and I’ve been really liking it. A lot of good ideas pulled from the other frameworks. https://www.solidjs.com/blog/introducing-solidstart

cool. any blessed scoped styling solution or is it the usual wild west?

Yup, CSS modules work out of the box. https://start.solidjs.com/core-concepts/css-and-styling

wild west? as far as CSS is concerned the cascade should be well known and for scoping its (in order of preference):

1. user 2. client 3. document

and within document its in "components", but those are unknown from the start so we defer the details (which must not but can lead to "wild west"). programming is hard, thought. would love to have that holy grail solved, too (apart from the famous three column layout).

For animations, the standard Web Animation API is very convenient. From what I can see, the animation library in Svelte looks pretty similar.