Indeed. When we did our first React applications without a JSX compile step, we even went further with the syntax with the power of functional programming. You could do stuff like:

    div({className: 'm-3', onClick }, 'the text')

Or go an abstraction step further create your own elements as a function, that take in custom parameters:

    navBar([navItem('Home', '/'), navItem('About', '/about')])

I mean, isn't that line actually quite expressive? It felt powerful to build the DOM exactly as you needed. You could generate anything without having to worry about JSX syntax, cause it's all JS and you can abstract using all of your toolkit. And if something goes wrong, you never have to look at JSX documentation or the JSX compiler output.