Agree completely!
I think the whole ecosystem is insane!
Something that needs 3 or more layers of transpilation...is not right. Typescript to Babylon to JS. Sass to css.
These are workarounds for native JS warts.
That's why Im excited about NATIVE web components and future releases of JavaScript becoming sophisticated enough that we can ignore all of this framework insanity.
Or even better...web assembly somehow taking over and making all of this pointless. Native Typescript. Yes please.
But to address your point, you're locked into JSX a lot more than someone writing in native browser code that doesn't need transpilation and can be ported between other frameworks at the end of the day.