The idea of JSX is I think genius.

If I were making a component rendering type library before React I would probably end up making some fake attributes on HTML elements the way Angular and a lot of other people do. It's a pretty simple idea. Pretty much everybody was doing it about the time of Backbone and Angular etc. etc. I'm sure you can think of other examples.

But whoever first came up with JSX said hey, if we're already making non standard HTML why not go all the way, allow you make your own semantic tree that we "render down" to HTML.

This of course allows you in fact separate out the media target - HTML, Native App, PDF, graphics from your renderable representation of that in code, and thus have different renderers for the same declarative way of structuring content.

https://github.com/chentsulin/awesome-react-renderer

So to me JSX is actually a sensible step up in abstraction layer, although not all the way yet, because you still need to have lots of specific knowledge of your particular media rendering target.

This is perhaps of particular interest to me as in about 2004 I was working on a media management system where the idea was you would feed in multiple markup formats, and a configuration for the media, and then use an in house declarative language to dynamically do things in each media, without having to have much understanding of how the media worked internally because our rendering pipeline took care of that - generated pdf, DHTML website (fancy menus), HTML help, and emails - with of course possibility of saving data for reuse in different media and cross media styling (use same company logos, color schemes, email addresses without having to write code for them in each media etc.)

sorry about last part, old programmer wandering.