Reading through Angular developer guide for standalone components filled in many of the gaps left after going through the "Getting Started with Angular Standalone Components" code lab. The two are complementary: the developer guide gave us reasons why standalone components exist, and the code lab gave us a taste of how to put them to use. Between framework infrastructure and library support, it becomes practical to make Angular components stand independently from Angular modules.

Which is great, but one important detail is missing from the documentation I've read. If it's such a great idea to have components independent from NgModule, why did components need NgModule to begin with? I assume sometime in the history of Angular, having components live in NgModule was a better idea than having components stand alone. Not knowing those reasons is a blank spot in my Angular understanding.

I had expected to come across some information on when to use standalone components and when to package components in NgModule. Almost every software development design decision is a tradeoff between competing requirements, and I had expected to learn when using a NgModule is a better tradeoff than not having them. But I haven't seen anything to that effect. It's possible past reasons for NgModule has gradually atrophied as Angular evolved with the rest of the web, leaving a husk that we can leave behind and there's no reason to go back. I would still appreciate seeing words to that effect from the Angular team, though.

One purported benefit was to ease the Angular learning curve, making it so we only have to declare dependencies in the component we're working on instead of having to do it both in the component and in its associated NgModule. As a beginner that reason sounds good to me, so I guess should write future Angular projects with standalone components until I have a reason not to. It's a fine plan but I worry I might run into situations when using NgModule would be a better choice and I wouldn't recognize "a reason not to" when it is staring me in the face.

On the topic of future projects, at some point I expect I'll grow beyond serving static content via GitHub Pages. Fortunately, I think I have a few free/trial options to explore before committing money.