Not saying that you're wrong, but the docs sure seem to imply that directives are the way to go: https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/index.html#Declarative-Rendering

Yeah, that was my own personal opinion prefacing the facts. Vue supports both, but the template system is generally used more in the Vue ecosystem than JSX is. Vue neatly fits between JSX and angular.js' clunky template language. Since the developer can quickly understand that Vue and React are both doing the same thing underneath, he can pick his preferred way to do it (template vs render func). I see in passing that more experienced devs I've worked with prefer the react way at a higher rate than those of less experience do. But mostly, you're right that v-directives are vastly more popular.

Every time I ask about people's JSX experiences in Vue I hear very little.

I came to vue liking JSX pretty well, but it does seem that culturally (or maybe just among newer developers like me) the single-file component with directives in the markup is more popular. Especially in tutorials. I haven’t really felt any pain with the default vue tenplating style that made me think switching to JSX again would be useful to me.