JSX is one simple conversion while coffeescript or elm are entire turing-complete languages. It's like claiming a smiley face on the back of a receipt is no different from the Mona Lisa.
You can also look at JSX and know exactly how it will compile to Javascript because it's so simple. (foo && <Component {...props} />) -> (foo && React.createElement(Component, props)).
It really is just React.createElement calls. It just isn't a huge departure.
Meanwhile, what Elm compiles to is very nontrivial. The comparison only makes sense if you never actually looked at what JSX does thus mistake it for something much more complex.
Try it out yourself: https://babeljs.io/repl
If the assertion is just that `var div = document.createElement('div')` is quite similar to `var div = React.createElement('div');` then of course I agree. In this sense, JSX+React is to DOM what XAML+WinForms is to win32. I had assumed we were discussing conceptual leap between native and framework-based UI implementations.
From a UI standpoint, it would be virtually just as hard for a JSX dev to implement a React app with purely `React.createElement()` as it would be to just write a native DOM application.
Yes, it's a move to declarative code from procedural one, that's right; what's important for my distinction is how is the move done. The question we're answering with React (as opposed to Vue, Angular, Razor...) is not declarative/procedural, but magical/not magical.
P.S. I heard that templates in Angular are not just templates anymore, they're converting them to function calls - I don't know the specifics, last Angular i saw was version 2.
I don't think that's true at all. I find react-hyperscript[0] and friends terser, more regular and just as easy to work with as JSX.
