I think you have it exactly backwards - the days of using string templates to assemble HTML pages was a weird and specialized era. React and modern JS tooling brings us back to traditional client/server GUI application development, just like we did in the 90s. And that's a good thing.
GUI development has its own set of concepts and broad applications. React is somewhat novel but still fits squarely in here; the idea of a GUI component is pretty enduring.
Distributed systems development has its own set of concepts and broad applications. With modern tooling, web interactions look just like traditional RPCs.
I programmed "full-stack" through the GUI fat client era, the primitive web era, and now the modern web era. I'm much happier developing with the modern tools.
and it isn't javascript, so it's essentially a template language. It's just being turned into javascript, which then goes into the vdom, which then gets diffed with the real DOM, which generates code to reconcile it with the real DOM.
> the days of using string templates to assemble HTML pages was a weird and specialized era.
I gotta say, I think React w/ JSX is far more of a weird and specialized era.
The real difference you're talking about is having the server render each user's UI versus offloading that to the user's machine. Regardless of whether it's via strings, 1s and 0s, https, rpc, etc. Browser's have become a more powerful "general purpose" renderer, so it makes more sense that they'll continue to take on more of the UI work themselves. It's still not as good as a purpose built client though, as sluggish electron apps have demonstrated. And sometimes it might still make sense to render the UI on the server (and cache it) for either / both simplicity and performance.
Occasionally you'll even do a bit of both with a client side app being rendered server side then hydrated... talk about a weird and specialized era.
While these terms are fuzzy, JSX has less in common with the template languages we used in the 2000s and more in common with interface builder languages like XUL. The experience is assembling components on a screen rather than generating HTML. Despite all the plumbing complexity, React/JSX (and Angular et al) feels fairly familiar to GUI developers from the 90s like me.
I agree with you that "client side app being rendered server side then hydrated" is pretty weird. I also don't think this is the future of the web but rather a holdover from the previous HTML-based era. It may never go away; after all, lots of content is very well suited to simple HTML.
GUI development has its own set of concepts and broad applications. React is somewhat novel but still fits squarely in here; the idea of a GUI component is pretty enduring.
Distributed systems development has its own set of concepts and broad applications. With modern tooling, web interactions look just like traditional RPCs.
I programmed "full-stack" through the GUI fat client era, the primitive web era, and now the modern web era. I'm much happier developing with the modern tools.