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We've just discussed this and our feeling is that we'd rather avoid having multiple ways of achieving the same thing, so introducing two new component metadata properties as alternative to the existing ones—but with fewer capabilities—feels undesirable to the team.

That said, it might make sense to allow styles in particular (not styleUrls) to be string | string[], as it's still meaningful to have multiple styles in a single template string (thus there wouldn't be a need for the property to become singular).

Allowing styles to be a string instead of a string array would make single file components prettier. prettier/prettier#8214

styles: string | string[] is a nice alternative. Though, I wonder how many tools this would break as all of them assume that styles is an array.

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