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It's optional, and also not optional. Nobody is using React without JSX in practice, because it's ugly and verbose.

Not true, without JSX, React is basically Mithril, if you alias React.createElement to a short function name.

Yeah, and I'm arguing that it's pretty ugly to write nested html that way.

Hater-or-lover of JSX, it is definitely an intuitive way to think about HTML in the context of JS.

I prefer the vue model that's a bit closer to the metal, though, if only because of quirks like className

Think I see what you are getting at--in practice most folks using React are going to use JSX and build tools, and if you alias the function it's kind of non-standard.

Mithril has "class" instead of "className"; that irks me too.

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