I used Knockout in professional dev environment for almost 10 years. A lot of these ideas are inspired by experience there. I want to be clear when I say Component-less I'm mostly talking about from a runtime update cycle perspective not that we are getting rid of modularization. Knockout is a perfect example of this since its View Models run once, it is the primitives that update. My library Solid is like a modern re-interpretation of Knockout.

But more than this I think we can take this further though when looking at compilers. Things like Svelte. We can do more than what is being done today.

Knockout was great for it's time but it also has aged significantly. There is a sort of niceness in its ease of use but libraries like Alpine.js also capture that in more modern ways. Knockout just hasn't been kept up to date sadly. Projects like https://www.tko.io/ haven't really taken off. So it has been getting time to move on.