Sometimes, depending on the team and the project, it will make sense to store at least some of that complexity in the HTML.
Usually, it forces all kinds of artificial constraints on the app, such as atomic ratings counts when a looser, more cache-friendly requirement would suffice, etc.,
They were supposed to be awesome because they didn't require code. Looking closer, they'd just replaced code with declarative config files that spread a given piece of functionality across multiple files/formats that were sometimes harder to debug.
Each layer implemented comes with additional complexity, not less. The real solution always seems to come down to simplicity and minimalism. To my mind, it's always seemed that limiting the number of technologies employed is a useful goal.