I do this with React all the time as well, though via ClojureScript and Re-frame[1], in which nodes are represented as plain Clojure data structures.

E.g., send an article from the server, formatted in EDN/Hiccup[2][3]. Insert it into a component in the frontend, and it's converted to VDOM nodes. No further logic or conversion required.

[1]: https://github.com/Day8/re-frame

[2]: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

[3]: https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup/wiki/Syntax