I'm only a hobbyist game dev, but I've always understood EC separately from ECS. EC was the answer to God objects and deep, inflexible inheritance hierarchies.

I'm only a hobbyist game dev, but I've always understood EC separately from ECS. EC was the answer to God objects and deep, inflexible inheritance hierarchies. Among other things, ECS is partially a performance play - it's more cache friendly. I'm not sure what all the tradeoffs are though, I've only really used EC.