How would you solve that? To this day I've never seen a workable proposal.
Slots need to have a host element to select slotted nodes from. ShadowRoot provides that host. Everyone who I've seen say that it's easy comes up with an ambiguous system that doesn't work in many cases and could never be standardized.
Which is a common problem with most "web components suck" takes - they have no sympathy for standards developers or the difficulty of the problem and somehow assume the spec people are dumb or evil, and they don't do the work to show how something could realistically be better.
> How would you solve that? To this day I've never seen a workable proposal.
Stencil.js[0] has a working "proposal" or workaround. Not sure if it is good or bad but at least it seems to work. When you ask users of an API how it could be better they should not be responsible for the implementation. If it can't be done so it is better to not do it in place of having a half working solution that most people decide to not use because it does not work for their use cases.
> they have no sympathy for standards developers or the difficulty of the problem
The problem with the browsers API is a lack of an understanding on how to design good ergonomic APIs for the end user. All the standards developers I talked think shadowDOM is great and people that don't like it are holding it wrong.
I don't think that standards did anything wrong or incompetent, but with hindsight considering all the complexities they bring i am hot sure they have been worth it