What is the purpose of the will-change property and its trade-offs?

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Will-change is a hint that tells the browser which properties are going to change so it can prepare rendering ahead of time. The idea is to enable smoother animations by letting the browser optimize painting and potentially promote the element to its own compositing layer before the changes happen. The trade-off is memory and GPU usage: creating and keeping extra layers costs resources, so overusing the hint or applying it to many elements can actually slow things down or increase memory pressure. Use it only for properties you know will change (typically transform or opacity) and remove the hint after the animation or change is done to free up resources. It’s not about forcing a redraw every frame, it isn’t a default duration setting, and it’s not deprecated.