Maybe because you’re thinking of it like a template language. It is not. It is JavaScript through and through. And mapping over an array is quite idiomatic. So are ternary operators. If you really prefer you can pop that out into a for loop with a full-blown if statement, but that’s not very common—at least not in React.

I think the long history of being served over the wire drove the community to prefer shorter, more terse code.