Initially I didn't see the value in React. I thought that the whole virtual DOM compiling on every change was a waste of resources instead of just doing the change itself directly.

But as it turns out it's a great abstraction worth using for the right things (not every part of the web) and one of those are Single Page Applications.

A lot of comments here are about people linking JSX instead of React and that's a good abstraction too. In Mint (https://mint-lang.com/) I'm trying to create a language for SPAs and having HTML syntax helps.