Agreed. The main complaint is just "I want a framework and I chose a library."

JSX isn't even required either. It just desugars into:

    React.createElement(elementClassorString, props, children);

If they want to use their own function for that... they can, but JSX is a trivially easy way to describe nested components (which can get verbose with the above).

A nice bonus of JSX is that it also means your components and render templates are not tied to React at all (if you're using stateless functions anyhow). You can switch the React.Component part trivially with babel to anything else (like deku, yolk, a custom one, whatever).

So.. yeah, seems an odd complaint.