Styled Components is a CSS in JS library. It generates classes from your CSS and inject them into components. This is much more complicated than adding a `<style />` tag in your component!
Smooth UI is not better than other libraries like Material UI or Ant UI but the focus is different. Smooth UI put the focus on developer experience, extending a style is very simple. Also it exposes some classes, you don't have to learn any API to extend components, you can simply inspect components and use the classes!
In fact, components like Radios and Checkboxes are very complex to create. So we use Smooth UI as a base, but it is intentionally very light (no big components).
About TypeScript, I am sorry, I am not a TypeScript user. TypeScript support would be awesome but I need some help on this!
The real game changer in Smooth UI is the way to extend components. This is a CodeSandbox example, feel free to play with it! https://codesandbox.io/s/7k8o4x7lj6
For Less and Sass, it's not very annoying because you don't have to write a lot of ruby code. But writting a complete deployment script if you don't know ruby is very hard... I love to be able to use my favorite JS modules in my deploy script, that's why I wrote Shipit.
Shipit can be an Ansible replacement, but there is no command abstraction to Shipit. Shipit is designed to quickly deploy a project on a set of servers not to configure an entire server.
They used in to deploy projects internally, same for Le Monde. Shipit is not designed to Shipit projects over a lot of servers. It's designed to Shipit small projects or even to ship code on hardware (like raspberry).
Shipit is an automation and deployment tool, git hook is just a hook on a git command. You can't run a command on 10 servers in parallel using git hook post-receive.