alt Hacker NewsTemplates are great until they need to be dynamic. Then you're right back to the current situation where frameworks like React are just the better way.
In fact, you could call JSX a "Dynamic Templating System" and that's a reasonable summary of what it is (in addition to other things of course).
There might be some ways that React itself could, internally, notice the special cases and special times where it _could_ be slightly more performant from using a lower level of templating, as an optimization, but I'd certainly prefer that to be abstracted away and buried deep inside React, rather than ever having to think about it myself, at the JSX layer.
Someone can let me know if React is already leveraging this for browsers that support it, I didn't research that.
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The system described in the article is very React-like, and could be used by future versions of React. In both, functions return a description of HTML to render, which can be applied either to create new HTML or to update previously rendered HTML.
"If I could wave my magic wand..." at least 2 of 3 of the changes I'd made about the way frontend web is developed, would be about `<template>`s:
1. Making it possible to do something like <template src="..."> and being able to load them from an external source
2. Making them "dynamic"
3 (and the most controversial one) that all CSS, HTML and Javascript (if you don't hate it) could be written natively like QML - one syntax to rule them all.