Nue indeed looks interesting. I could not immediately understand whether it uses a one-way data binding. Without it, and without a reactive model of some sort, building large UIs becomes a pain.
The React-based button from some framework is either over-engineered, or does way more than just a button. Using or not using such a component is a choice.
React may be a bit large (like 30-50 kB for a "hello world"), but preact is below 6 kB and gives you 90% of the React power for lighter-weight apps.
Also, the point of React is building huge and hugely complex dynamic UIs. There are much lighter-weight tools to add small bits of interactivity to mostly static pages, which are still the majority of the Web. (Ironically, HTMX is 14 kB, 2.5 timex larger than preact.)
We also created fixi, which is sort of preact to htmx’s react:
https://github.com/bigskysoftware/fixi
a goal of fixi is to be smaller uncompressed than preact is compressed, to force us to be minimalist
This is really nice and simple.
I wonder how would the Web develop if something like this appeared in 1997 along with DHTML.