Author here: Those don't look like HTML enough because they're not markup. Every single one of the top frameworks uses markup with interpolations as their basic template format: React, Vue, Angular, Preact, Lit, Svelte, Solid, Quik, Stencil, Marko, Polymer, FAST, and on and on.

Frameworks and rendering libraries that don't have a markup-based template syntax are just very rare.

And I think for understandable reasons: Markup-based templates look like the output, and web developers know HTML, so the templates are easier to read and write.

That StackOverflow question seems unrelated because it's asking about untagged template literals. With tagged template literals, depending on the return type, you can absolutely get to the underlying values.