That's probably what they would have done if starting from scratch, but Remix is built on top of React Router which is a 7-8 year old project with its own idiom

That's probably what they would have done if starting from scratch, but Remix is built on top of React Router which is a 7-8 year old project with its own idioms. Also, Remix is for React developers. It's expected you will use JSX, components, etc. Personally I have a toy client-side router for Svelte. Links that need to trigger client-side navigation simply use a Svelte action: <a href="/" use:link>Home</a> https://github.com/PierBover/roots-svelte-router https://github.com/PierBover/roots-svelte-router