As I understand, the mental models are different enough that it wouldn't make much sense to merge them. You could certainly bundle a React app as a Web Compon

As I understand, the mental models are different enough that it wouldn't make much sense to merge them. You could certainly bundle a React app as a Web Component, but React components only make sense as React components. Because React treats the DOM as effectively write-only and optimizes for performance, I doubt the React core team would ever want to change the internals to make use of Web Components.