I agree with everything you say, except the "shocking cost" part. Its all a matter of perspective. You would have to write the transpiler anyway, since on a la

I agree with everything you say, except the "shocking cost" part. Its all a matter of perspective. You would have to write the transpiler anyway, since on a larger team if you're working with a designer, you would probably get HTML from them and soon get tired of manually translating it to function calls. I'd bet this is how JSX got started in the first place.