You don't have to JSX inside your render function. You can use React's built-in factories. Other than that, getting around slow DOM manipulation is only one ad

You don't have to JSX inside your render function. You can use React's built-in factories. Other than that, getting around slow DOM manipulation is only one advantage of React. There are many others, such as making it super easy to reason about complex code, for example by not having to worry about the excruciating details of how multiple event handlers that are bound to the same element will behave. Separating the state from the DOM itself is a brilliant idea and the elegance with which React accomplishes this disproves your claim that it is simply an "ugly patch".