"You don't need to know JavaScript." Blazor's promise landed, and produced a generation of .NET developers who ship full-stack web apps without ever writing a single useEffect. The side effect: their mental model of the browser froze almost a decade ago.

Meanwhile the platform underneath kept moving. Customizable select-elements. Anchor positioning. View Transitions. Container queries. @container scroll-state. Native popovers. Most of it works alongside Blazor with zero JavaScript and replaces component-library wrappers that are no longer earning their place.

This talk is a live tour of what's actually in the browser your Blazor app isn't using, and a decision framework for auditing which wrappers in your component library still buy you something in 2026. Along the way: why Copilot will keep recommending the 2018 answer, and what that means for staying current when your AI pair is trained on the past.

You'll leave with five features you can ship Monday and one uncomfortable question about your dependencies.