I really like having to escape all the plain text. I think all the React-like code I’ve written has been at least 90% code and tags, not plain text, and the lack of escaping occasionally causes bugs (usually printing the name of a variable instead of its value).
Fair enough, on reflection I think I would lean towards escaping both as a principle of least surprise. There's something a bit 'doing magic' about the way it reads at the moment.