I had the complete opposite reaction. I learned a bit of React through a rails + react tutorial and I was lost pretty much the entire time. Having to write HTML using either JSX or the ReactDOM syntax was a complete nightmare. Granted the testing options of both beat out angular, but even at a surface level React just wasn't appealing.
> Having to write HTML using either JSX or the ReactDOM syntax was a complete nightmare.
Can you expand on this? I find writing JSX to be a breeze. JSX is basically HTML with a few small tweaks (e.g., for => htmlFor, class => className). If you use a linter, it will catch those mistakes for you while you're learning.
I think that in order to start seeing the appeal, you have to have seen the alternative. Before angular, I was writing a lot of backbone apps, and generally, they were well organized and easy to maintain.
With angular, I've found that my apps have devolved into a huge tag soup very quickly. It didn't take me long to realize that the templating syntax was a huge part of what made angular suck really bad, and its like the article says: "Angular 2 continues to put 'JS' into HTML."
So to me, JSX is at the core of what makes React feel manageable, since I can use OO and encapsulation techniques of javascript to deal with complex rendering and still keep my code organized and easy to follow.
The more I think about it, angular reminds me a lot of Coldfusion in its approach.
I used backbone a lot too, and despite their obvious differences, react feels like backbone's spiritual successor in terms of being 'Just Javascript' that solved problems, rather than a fullblown framework.
For the longest time I totally saw react as replacing backbone views, but in practice that was unwieldy and the stateful, unidirectional approaches (Jesus that needs a catchy acronym!) made more sense given what I was trying to achive.
