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I believe generating the HTML is what the term render means in this case.

No it is not. Same as videogames generate scenes and videocards render those scenes.

Render is the final step presented to user. Users do not see HTML, they see text, boxes with background colors, buttons, those are html elements rendered for visual consuption.

In the whole React ecosystem render is used as a keyword to produce HTML/DOM abstractions though. For example class based components having the render function.

The rendering you mention never happened anywhere in the React JS code. Browser did the rendering internally.

>the whole React ecosystem

Web is much more than the React "ecosystem".

Other libs/frameworks also use the word render. E.g. https://vuejs.org/guide/extras/rendering-mechanism.html

those steps could be understood as pre-renders:

from js class to dom objects => pre render 1 from dom to html => pre render 2 from html to display graphics => final render

In React, 'rendering' means creating the DOM nodes and 'painting' refers to browser rendering [1]. So with server-side rendering the DOM nodes are 'rendered' by the server and the browser 'paints' it.

[1] https://react.dev/learn/render-and-commit

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