Edit: After reading my comment again, I feel I must mention; even that similarity is not coming from React directly. It's JSX. Although they go like fish & chips together (Not a great analogy but I guess I'm hungry).
It's a templater, read my message above - an advanced tempalter, which means it has some DOM rendering optimizations.
> The only similarity between PHP and React is that you can have tags in ("around" in PHP's case) your code.
Not just tags, but an entire "view" thing, a representation, so old fashion messy/sloppy/spaghetti-like PHP like code style.
For PHP (in its traditional form), everything around the code is just strings, which is also the case for most of the templating engines.
You can't shout "spaghetti code" every time you see XML tags in code. Think Scala or VB.
the notion that your view logic and it's template must be completely decoupled is an antiquated and misguided best practice.