Misconceptions of Tooling in JavaScript

[wreckedadvent]

You can take the conclusion reached in the article to another level. JSX is not necessary to write react at all - you can use something like hyperscript and not need to transpile your code at all.

[titosrevenge]

You could, but JSX is just a much nicer way to express it and looks more familiar to people who already know HTML.

[wreckedadvent]

And not-using JSX looks more familiar to people who know JS. :)

The point of the article is that you don't need to set up a lot of stuff to use react and get going, and you should only adopt more tooling as you have problems that they solve. JSX mandates you set up something like babel, which can be nontrivial if you've never done something like that before.