Styling React components is a huge pain. What I like about Vue is the awesome styles, HTML and js in one file for each component. With React projects I have a completely seperate styles folder.
https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/react-without-jsx.html
- Defaults matter; templates as defaults means most examples, support, tools, extensions, etc. will assume templating.
- React without JSX doesn't actually affect the code structure or flow. Looping, conditionals, composition etc. all stay the same; and that shouldn't be surprising since JSX is essentially no more than a slightly different syntax for nested method calls and object literals; which is quite unlike templates in vue; those have actual semantics too.
I've used react without jsx before (some time ago for a coffeescript based project), and it affects little. If you do that, you'll want to introduce some alternative shorthand to avoid all those repetitive "React.createElement" calls, but doing so is trivial - after all, it's just method calls and object literals.
I'm not a huge fan of custom languages like JSX in general, and indeed JSX too (I believe) was a mistake. However, with sufficient support and a small enough target to support, it's less of an issue. Still, even extremely well funded projects like razor are clearly much less well supported by tooling than the language they're based on, even many years later. Vue's templates? Completely hopeless.
If you are interested in HTML, JavaScript and Styles in one component you really want Web Components. React and view.js support components but they are brittle. W3 Web Components (implemented by Chrome and Safari) solve this problem. More on that here: https://github.com/wisercoder/uibuilder
There are two distributions of Vue, one in which templates are precompiled (this is the default and recommended build), and one bundling the runtime template compiler. You are most likely thinking of the latter.