Yes, another case of old school web dev making a comeback. “HTML over the wire” is basically server-rendered templates (php, erb, ejs, jinja), sent asynchronously as structured data and interpreted by React to render the component tree.
What’s being done here isn’t entirely new. Turbo/Hotwire [1], Phoenix LiveView, even Facebook’s old Async XHP explored similar patterns. The twist is using JSX to define the component tree server-side and send it as JSON, so the view model logic and UI live in the same place. Feels new, but super familiar, even going back to CGI days.