You can still get all of those advantages using React without JSX. Reusable components have nothing to do with JSX. Syntax checking/highlighting/etc. is arguably easier (in a global sense) without JSX since we don't need to fork acorn or esprima to get it.
This becomes even better when using a TypeScript capable editor with TSX, creating classes for the components and taking advantage of full autocomplete and syntax checking from your editor. Your code ends up pretty readable, composable and error free.