I think it's mostly performance as the browser can add performance optimisations for HTML but not unevaluated JavaScript. The alternative is a "display: none"

I think it's mostly performance as the browser can add performance optimisations for HTML but not unevaluated JavaScript. The alternative is a "display: none" block, but that triggers a calculation of styles, where <template> can never be rendered so it's evaluated (likely in parallel to JS) by the browser without style calculations. The optimisations lose weight if the <template> tag is added programatically later. For it to be maximally efficient; all of the <template> tags must be inlined in your HTML prior to your application loading. You can play around with loading it asynchronously to ensure nothing blocks.