"Taking the frontend to the next level" feels like an immature motivation, for lack of a better term. What does "next level" even mean? Framing it this way makes it seem like our primary goal as developers is simply to elevate our application to some vague "next level."

My general goal is achieving decoupling, user experience, and performance. Your proposal seems to focus solely on the developer's perspective. This approach compromises experience and performance when building atomic web components, as it assumes that a button requires JavaScript to render. This would only make sense in an SPA or under two specific circumstances in a traditional model:

If you ignore the screen flicker caused by the HTML being rendered and displayed before the JavaScript loads and executes.

If you add the complexity of rendering your web component on the server, assuming applications will necessarily run in Node.js.

Starting with atomic components, as you suggested, doesn't seem ideal to me. It's easier, yes, but not ideal. That's why I believe we fall into certain traps: there's a tendency to assume that what is convenient is necessarily ideal.