Sure, you're right about that. It's just that everybody, for example, has the option to use React.createElement directly without JSX, as it's just a syntax sugar and people use it because they prefer it over the other option. Let's consider Vue's syntax:

    <template v-for="todo in todos">
        <li v-if="!todo.isComplete">
            {{ todo.name }}
        </li>
    </template>

Genuinely, do developers have the option to "just use JS" here (for looping and conditional)? I personally think this Vue example is very inferior to JS and I see it as an unnecessary complexity unless this "weird string magic" is what enables some nice-to-have feature which is not possible with plain JS.

You can write render functions manually in vue too.