That’s without JSX. Transpilation is required in order to make use of JSX.
Not recommended for large projects in production (but then I'd be using webpack or similar for large vue projects too), but it works pretty well (and surprisingly fast) for quick experiments.
In this lesson I cover JSX:
https://github.com/kay-is/react-from-zero/blob/master/02-jsx...
Personally, I don't find the function-call format that "annoying", and I think it presents some advantages neither JSX nor template strings have, along with some disadvantages (it's more verbose, like you pointed out).
The only time when you won't really have access to a tool chain is for quick demos with just an html page and a script tag (if you don't want to pull in babel as a script), but most online tool allow jsx too now anyway.