> Can you have higher order components? In react this is a function that returns a component, often taking another component as a parameter.

The standard way to do this in QML is using the Loader object: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qml-qtqml-component.html

You can also go full-eval of course: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtqml-javascript-dynamicobjectcreation...