> You traverse and read JSON and convert it to HTML
It gets converted to DOM nodes, and there is zero HTML source involved when using a component toolkit. Whereas in PHP, you can do things like this and it won't make a peep:
$foo = '<h1 <um & hi=="bla""foo"""arglebargle>>>>>';
?><?= $foo ?>
Other template engines like twig or blade will at least escape it by default, but of course have a syntax for interpolating it raw, otherwise they wouldn't be very useful as template engines. That's the sort of templating I'm talking about. JSX is a tree builder syntax that doesn't even produce strings at all on the client side, and when rendered in SSR, produces HTML source that's correct by construction (syntactically anyway). You can call that "fake templating", I'd say it's not templating at all.
Obviously there are other server-side template engines out there that are also correct in this fashion (HAML comes to mind), but I'm not referring to those, and neither is most of the "server-side is all you ever need" crowd.
