Not how it works per se, its how it feels. I admit this to be a subjective metric, but it felt all kinds of Angular-like when I authored web components. Lots of boilerplate and indirection that I didn't enjoy. Its not the declarative authoring experience I was hoping for.
Stencil was the cleanest to me because components felt like components, and could be interacted with more naturally.
There's just alot of missing pieces. Tooling matters. Ecosystem matters. Developer Experience matters. There's a reason so many people turn to Next.js or Nuxt etc.
Having worked with both stencil and lit for years each, there's very little difference between them in how they operate? Stencil uses jsx, lit uses template literals. Otherwise there's a striking degree of similarity. You could probably convert a stencil component to lit in an hour or so (in fact, I have done this multiple times as I migrated away from stencil).
If anything lit has some additional niceties, a better ecosystem, and less restrictions that gets imposed by stencil's compiler
Stencil was the cleanest to me because components felt like components, and could be interacted with more naturally.
There's just alot of missing pieces. Tooling matters. Ecosystem matters. Developer Experience matters. There's a reason so many people turn to Next.js or Nuxt etc.