You give React a state, it diffs that and passes the outcome to the ReactDOM, which can render it on the DOM. At its core React doesn't know what a <div/> is. I

You give React a state, it diffs that and passes the outcome to the ReactDOM, which can render it on the DOM. At its core React doesn't know what a <div/> is. It just diffs objects and generates instructions to reach the next state (very generally speaking here). The stuff you pass to it is an object and can't be malformed like a string can. Main function of React is maybe loosely related with templating. For PHP (in its traditional form), everything around the code is just strings, which is also the case for most of the templating engines. You can't shout "spaghetti code" every time you see XML tags in code. Think Scala or VB.