It is, but I meant more in a 'traditional' way, so rendering with some templating engine whose abstractions aren't so far detached from HTML as they are with React. Mostly by mixing some dynamic parts into HTML rather than the other way around.
A React application gets applied to a certain DOM element. Inside of that application are multiple layers of containing elements that handle things like routing or processing different events on existing DOM elements or triggered remote calls.
If you add redux and something like redux-form you end up with sending each keyup event to the redux store and re-rendering your input fields from that store.
So yes the JSX at the very bottom of your software tree is pretty much like HTML, but it takes a whole lot of engineering to get there and variables get pushed through many layers before they reach the final JSX in which they are rendered.
Some of this has to do with how you implement your application, but in general getting from input to output takes more steps than it does with a server side rendering framework.
This is fine when building something like a mobile application or an off-line-ready application like devdocs.io, but if you use a React application in front of some back-end you are just getting HTML in return for all your engineering efforts. If HTML with a few interactions is all you are after there is too much code and too many layers between the page that has your `<div id='myapp' />` and what you get after React is done rendering.
Sure, I get that. What I'm saying is -- if you prefer to keep things simple and use server rendering, using server rendering alone with React (no routing, Redux, etc) is pretty much identical to using templates.
You can treat React itself as a single-pass server template engine with component support. You don't have to bring all of this single-page app stuff into it. Hope that explains my point. You don't even have to run React on the client at all.
I'm specifically talking about ReactDOMServer.renderToString() on the server and serving that HTML. Not "mounting into a <div>" client use case.
Yes you are totally right. JSX in itself and the way you can nest React components, etc is very nice and could be great as a template engine. I should have said more clearly that I meant React et al. in the context of rendering everything on the client-side.
