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Author here. My target audience here was really people who've already decided they're going to use React, and are keen on understanding what is going on under the hood. And while I do love JSX (and use it in my own projects), my feeling is that to really grok React, writing something without JSX is invaluable.

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I'm part of that target audience, and you scored a bullseye with me. I always prefer to learn a new technology this way, by building very simple things from scratch and making minor modifications this way and that until I know what all the low-level parts do. Then, you can add some conveniences to the mix explaining what they do in terms of the underlying technology I just learned (and I can tell which parts are the base technology and which belong to this add-on), until I feel I could recreate these conveniences or build my own alternatives, if I chose to.

That way, I can decide for myself how to use the technology, break away from the typical stack of add-ons at any point I choose and take it from there in a direction that better suits my needs, dig in and figure out what's going on if I have a problem, and so on, rather than being helplessly dependent on a magical black box.

Thank you for starting off by teaching low-level React without any JSX, Flux, Redux, or whatever. I wish more tutorials did that.

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