Disclaimer: I am not a web dev. The simplest explanation I've come across is that web components lets you create pockets of html, css, and JavaScript that are

Disclaimer: I am not a web dev. The simplest explanation I've come across is that web components lets you create pockets of html, css, and JavaScript that are self-contained and, importantly, not affected by the actions of external css and JavaScript. The browser vendors originally created it for themselves so that they could do things like build a standardized html5 video player interface using html but without worrying about you iterating over the internal elements in js or screwing up the buttons with css.