The component plugin is one of the base Merkur plugins which adds base lifecycle methods and properties to your widget. Other Merkur plugins can depend on it.
Documentation for @merkur/plugin-component.
The Merkur is tiny extensible javascript library for front-end microservices. It allows by default server side rendering for loading performance boost. You can connect it with other frameworks or languages because merkur defines easy API. You can use one of four predefined template's library Preact, µhtml, Svelte and vanilla but you can easily extend for others.