You don't have to, you can work with React straight from vanilla JavaScript though. I don't know anyone who does it though (except in tests), because it's nearl

You don't have to, you can work with React straight from vanilla JavaScript though. I don't know anyone who does it though (except in tests), because it's nearly not as pleasant to work with as JSX. It is possible to separate JSX elements from the rest of your code if you use ES6 React components or functional components (that is, you don't use React.createClass), because in those cases there is no need to compile the components themselves, so in theory you could separate the "HTML" bits into separate, dedicated files. It's not really a problem I've faced so far, but might end up doing in the future.