> And yet, with JSX we have a gratuitously non-standard dialect of JavaScript that isn't on the standards track and will never be natively supported in browsers

> And yet, with JSX we have a gratuitously non-standard dialect of JavaScript that isn't on the standards track and will never be natively supported in browsers. It just gets compiled down to native javascript. JSX is also optional in React - meaning that you don't have to use it. And having an actual client-side data-structure to represent DOM is arguably better than using string based templates which is what folks have been using for decades. Also, compilation is not a dirty word - when you consider just how primitive the standard language is. A static type-checking compilation pass also helps keep large codebases/modules manageable, and aids refactoring by being able to catch errors - without actually having to run the code to figure out what it does. It's true that there is unnecessary fragmentation. But the broad trend reveals that front-end development is actually starting to catch up with best-practice.