alt Hacker NewsFunny. To me JSX is a much superior language compared to HTML templating. And I would say it's provably so. You can do JSX-in-JS-in-JSX recursively in a way that is "natural" and "safe" and "maintainable". And with TypeScript you get great IDE support, ability to refactor and whatnot.
No need to trust my word, just look at the huge amount of code in JSX that the world is maintaining at the moment.
I would say the only problem is the performance cost that we have to pay for this - the shadow DOM and (as a result) the hooks mess that we have in React. But it feels more like a problem that needs to be solved in order to use the much superior way of writing code (JSX). Not the other way around (sacrifice JSX for performance)
And I get that it can be overwhelming if you still haven't made the "jump", it just doesn't sound fair to criticize something that you don't understand.
JSX is a huge conceptual mistake, IMO.
Sure, it gives you expressiveness, flexibility, and templating for "free", but this comes at the expense of the separation of concerns principle, which is a bad tradeoff.
HTML is concerned with the content and structure of the page. JS is concerned with behaviour and interactivity. Using JS, or any programming language for that matter, to control how HTML is rendered introduces reasoning problems about the content and structure that just wouldn't exist if you wrote plain HTML. Yes, modern web pages are almost always dynamic, but the correct way of implementing this is via the data model, or an intermediate controller layer.
That is, JSX enables the programmer to violate the MVC/MVVM model, which is a far superior approach of building applications.
I can't count the number of times where I've stared at a JSX file and had no idea what the "component" was actually doing. Reviewing any changes to it is practically impossible because you need to keep all the layers in mind, and essentially interpret the logic and rendering in your head.
This just doesn't happen with the MVC/MVVM approach. Every layer has a specific concern, and you can clearly trace the data flow, from when the data is read, to how it's used and manipulated, to how it's finally rendered. This is a major win for building maintainable applications, and disregarding this has made frontend web development an absolute hell.
It gets even worse when CSS can be written in JS as well... This "everything in JS" trend is an abomination.
Svelte does the right thing here and at least conceptually separates the layers, but at the end of the day, you're still writing in a DSL that gets compiled into JS, which has its own quirks and issues.
The frontend industry needs a hard reset that takes us away from this gigantic pile of abstractions and back to using native web technologies, which are quite capable on their own by now. Recently I've found Nue and Datastar to be the much needed steps in the right direction.