The Honest Verdict

ARKlight and React/Vue/Svelte/Angular are not really competing for the same job. One question below decides which category actually applies to you.

Do you need client-side interactivity beyond clicks toggling things?

If yes -- forms with live validation, drag-and-drop, real-time dashboards -- a traditional framework is the right tool. ARKlight's JS is a closed, named vocabulary by design, not a smaller version of a full runtime.

Is your team already fluent in JS/TS and an existing framework?

If yes, switching costs likely outweigh ARKlight's benefits today -- it's a young, single-maintainer project without React/Vue/Svelte's ecosystem.

Do you write Python, need a handful of static pages, and want zero npm toolchain?

This is ARKlight's actual sweet spot: docs stubs, internal tools, a landing page templated out of a script, teaching contexts. Genuinely pleasant there.