Well, have you ever tried to build a web component with nothing but the APIs that were proposed as browser standard and are (maybe with the exception of HTML imports), rolled out across the major browsers, i.e. custom elements, HTML templates, Shadow DOM and HTML imports?
I did that as an experiment once, and came to the conclusion that what can be considered well-supported is technically enough, but it's rather inconvenient to build actually useful things with. I was very much concerned with low level plumbing stuff and found the outcome to be something which I would not like to do on a major scale or maintain in the long run.
There have been several attempts to provide more convenient abstractions to build web components. Polymer was a rather early attempt. Competitors are e.g. x-tags, svelte, StencilJS, and relatively recent, Angular Elements. Out of them I've worked only with Stencil and Angular Elements, so I can't tell you how much convenience Polymer really puts on the table, at the very least, the templating and data binding seems to be half-way decent.
The promise of web components is sharing framework agnostic widgets. I.e. you don't have a vendor lock-in as a user of the component, and can mix and match components from different sources, you can do plain JS or combine it with a framework. In theory at least.
I think Google backed/backs Polymer because it fits nicely into its strategy of pushing Progessive Web Apps and the web as application platform in general.
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Well, have you ever tried to build a web component with nothing but the APIs that were proposed as browser standard and are (maybe with the exception of HTML imports), rolled out across the major browsers, i.e. custom elements, HTML templates, Shadow DOM and HTML imports?
I did that as an experiment once, and came to the conclusion that what can be considered well-supported is technically enough, but it's rather inconvenient to build actually useful things with. I was very much concerned with low level plumbing stuff and found the outcome to be something which I would not like to do on a major scale or maintain in the long run.
There have been several attempts to provide more convenient abstractions to build web components. Polymer was a rather early attempt. Competitors are e.g. x-tags, svelte, StencilJS, and relatively recent, Angular Elements. Out of them I've worked only with Stencil and Angular Elements, so I can't tell you how much convenience Polymer really puts on the table, at the very least, the templating and data binding seems to be half-way decent.
The promise of web components is sharing framework agnostic widgets. I.e. you don't have a vendor lock-in as a user of the component, and can mix and match components from different sources, you can do plain JS or combine it with a framework. In theory at least.
I think Google backed/backs Polymer because it fits nicely into its strategy of pushing Progessive Web Apps and the web as application platform in general.