What I meant by the difference between the HTML in an Aurelia template and JSX is that the React component's markup has to be inside the its respective controll

What I meant by the difference between the HTML in an Aurelia template and JSX is that the React component's markup has to be inside the its respective controller's render() method. That's the main issue. I am not arguing about JSX syntax, but rather the principle behind it. How would I safely refactor a css class across hundreds of components in a safe way and not by find/replace? An IDE such as WebStorm actually tracks CSS classes by their reference in other HTML/CSS files and this includes CSS preprocessors. I know it's a safe bet to run the renaming, although I always preview the changes beforehand. I'm a reasonable developer, but this is an anti-pattern that has been eschewed voraciously over the years. Your appeal to the intelligence of React's devs is an informal fallacy and doesn't change this fact. I am not trying to be dogmatic here. Yes, breaking the 'rules' when it is warranted is perfectly fine. My argument here is that in this case, this anti-pattern isn't warranted and will be very expensive work with as the product grows. I am advocating standards and best practices. React sidesteps both for an unnecessary reason. It works, it's pretty awesome how fast it is, but it cannot scale with a product's lifecycle. Web components keep the HTML in the DOM and are being officially adopted as a standard. They can be polyfilled with a lib from http://webcomponents.org/ http://webcomponents.org/. Aurelia, although it is a framework, is extremely lightweight and greatly simplifies the use of web components. Polymer isn't as elegant, but it clearly demonstrates the idea of dynamic reuse. There are other alternative libs as well. As an aside, ES6 is now standard and with Babel. Javascript is now closer to ECMA, as it was intended to be. I think I've made my argument as clear as I can, thank you for a great (and polite) discussion. It has actually been helpful for me to voice my opinion and get a better understanding of the support behind React. Again, it's impressive how fast it is over other libs such as jQuery, but jQuery's always been bloated and is near the end of its usefulness. However that point doesn't detract from the very cool things that React can do in the right hands. I wish I could bet on it, but to me it's the wrong horse in the race.