DOM sucks though, it's slow, it's heavyweight, it lacks transactions. We're stuck with it, and frameworks like React have to do the DOM diffing + patching thing, explicitly, in JS.
2. We're currently living in 2025. React (and SPAs) is not even slightly necessary.
Alex Russell has written swathes of arguments about Reacts performance issues https://infrequently.org/2024/11/if-not-react-then-what/
The DOM has become much faster since React started over a decade ago, the VDOM really isn’t needed anymore even for app like experiences
React is about developer preference over user experience
(I'm still of the sort that thinks Signals are just worse Observables, so it's not a proposal I'm particularly thrilled about, but were it to be adopted Signals are easy to use in Observable contexts as well, they are just uglier half-implemented BehaviorSubjects, though maybe with a few extra lint rules to prefer Observable behaviors over Signal ones.)
React lets you return dynamic tree structures and insert code anywhere inline in that structure. Most templates explicitly don’t allow that for good reason. Further, most but not all templating frameworks have special syntax for conditional logic and loops.
If JSX is templating then templating has no meaning. Would createElement() be a template? In that case all functional programming is.