i'm also using a "type safe" templating engine (for kotlin, as a gradle plugin) of my own design that goes the other way - instead of embedding a model class into the template, a template class is generated that takes all the values as parameters.

i.e. MyTemplate.tpl.html

    {if $foo}hello world, {$myname}!{else}goodbye, world.{/if}

which creates a kotlin class that can be used like this:

    MyTemplate(
      foo = true,
      myname = "bar"
    ).toString()

the biggest upside for me is that this way there's full, free IDE support, i don't need to write extra view models if the mapping isn't 1:1 and performance is pretty good because in the end there's no runtime parsing/compiling/interpreting except for the baseline JDK stuff (though there are even faster engines).

https://codeberg.org/h34tnet/tempolin

warning: so far i'm the only user though, so don't use it in production. also, i'm working on some improvements right now which haven't been pushed yet.