What perhaps boggles my mind the most about this is how many seem to freak out about the fact that there's "Javascript in the render function", but they are happy to write their markup in some templating language (especially if it's server-side).

Even disregarding the discussion of which concerns exactly are supposed to be separated and why, this seems to be perfectly inconsistent to me. It's as if their rule is "there should never be markup in a .js file or <script> tag", but other logic is perfectly fine, as long as the templating language is not JS. Or maybe I'm missing something they're saying.