I think the point is that React is a true programming language with syntactic sugar to make it look templates, vs templates that bolt on some language.

People who use it from ClojureScript, for one. Due to the nicer Clojure syntax you don't need a templating language, just a data convention (hiccup in this case).

For those of us who hope JS will slowly become just a compile target, a downside of of JSX is that it's tooling is JS specific, and the syntax is tailored to JS. So it's great that React isn't married to JSX.

I wrote a GUI framework that uses React API directly.

It's more proof of concept than useable, the idea is that we don't actually have to write layouts, we can just describe the layout with code or a template language and let the computer work it out.

https://github.com/samsquire/additive-guis

Yeah strangely it compiles to functions but they way they compose is not the way we compose function. Practically it's a template, compose via component mechanism. If it's a language it should be like Elm where attributes and children are also List and have return type, can be programed in function style.