I don't like Angular's default verbosity of separating the template from the logic, nor it's hijacking of the simple double quotes, but I disliked fighting with JSX and too too large files in React. Plus in my experience React projects grow their own verbosity too (in my last NextJS project every component had at least 2 files, one for wiring up the state and one for lowlevel view things, and it was awfully unclear what goes where). Plus the stringly typed state store :(
I don't think it's true that a general purpose language will be always better than a templating language. For one thing the template gets interpreted, there's already a context, it can be safer and more efficient. I mean JSX is great because it allows easy interpolation, in plain JS you would have to do backticks and ${} and the IDE/editor/linter would need to guess (or you would need to annotate the string like in Markdown) about the syntax and semantics of what you want to emit.
Of course making the jump from the host language to the target language too onerous leads to inefficient engineering, boundaries placed at convenient instead of optimal places, etc.
And it's very good that JSX allows stepping back to JS easily. Angular templates allow that too, but it's just not as fluid (probably because the syntax is just meh).
There are specific keywords to do things in template-land and there are non-template ways, that are more general and more messy. Because DSLs can be more effective for the things they were designed to express. The simple React HOC composition is similarly simple in Angular too, <ng-content /> and that's it. What's less appealing is that it happens in template land, and for some reason the wrapping in pure JS feels more powerful (to me too, don't get me wrong), but the actual hierarchy of components is defined in template - in JSX - in React too. It just feels closer to JS. (Rightfully so.)
