Why not use HTML templates and Web Components, or something? I would have thought React would become like jQuery, after Web Components were implemented natively in browsers, just like jQuery's functionality was. But it's still very popular.
Us frontend devs are so lost in the framework sauce that there is a 5 year lag between what web api's can do and when it hits our slack channels.
They are absolutely not equivalent to what react does, though there is overlap.
.vue
.svelte
FYI, React works with or without JSX, if that's really the hang up. But the developers overwhelmingly prefer JSX.
HTML templating (without JSX) gives you markup as strings, which means you don't get type checks, auto-complete, syntax highlighting etc.
Ultimately, like everything else it's trade-offs and personal preference.
I've seen it before, it uses template strings for html templating:
const myTemplate = (name) => html`<div>Hello ${name}</div>`;
Compared to JSX, I don't like it much. I feel that template strings are unergonomic and fiddly to type a lot, although maybe I'd get used to it.
Also, for what it is worth, JSX is mostly (despite a few attempts from React to complicate it) a very simple syntax transformer to boring function calls for mostly easy to write functions. We've had "h" functions for a long time before JSX and we'll have "h" functions still if JSX stops being an interesting thing to support.
I'm also not sure why you are offering Web Components as an alternative because it's exactly what you are criticizing, stuffing HTML into JS. It's basically just a more limited and less ergonomic version of React class components, that comes with it's own host of unique headaches.
At least in my experience, the best way to write both HTML Templates and Web Components is with JSX. The type checking and language services of JSX are still something of a best in class for serious type safety in complicated data binding and reactivity.
HTML Templates have "slots", but those are the simplest of holes and on the one hand support any HTML you want to place inside those holes, but on the other hand aren't a very deep template language for interactivity.
Web Components have some auto-magic with "slots" if you plan to use your HTML Templates to populate the Shadow DOM. But the Shadow DOM is super complicated, hard to style, and entirely optional. It's also still not a deep enough auto-magic to do deep interactivity easily.
We also still don't have "HTML Modules" even in strong polyfill, so distributing HTML Templates for Web Components is still something of an open problem.
Most highly interactive Web Components still have a template engine inside, even when they work alongside/with HTML Templates. JSX is still a great template language.
React itself may still be the jQuery of JSX-based because we seem to be swinging from Virtual DOM approaches back to "Real" DOM approaches, but JSX can be used for more than just Virtual DOM. (I've been successfully using my own library Butterfloat that uses JSX but is not a Virtual DOM in nice to tree-shake, wonderfully type safe Web Components.)
[0] - https://preactjs.com/
I made a minimal Vue-inspired templating thingy a while back and a fair bit of the codesize (part due to impl and part due to architecture to make it solid) is spent to handle cases of structural changes (adding/removing items, updating event listeners,etc).
I have made such an app using TinyJS, would you like to see it?
const appState = {...state}
Would it be better if I attached the things I need to the state object that I receive?
function createState(state) {
state._update = () => ...
....
return new Proxy(state, ...)
}