The JSX data model isn't that much worse than the regular DOM. In many areas it is certainly much simpler. For a while different Virtual DOMs had somewhat different "internal" variants but as React has worked to simplify their internal model over their versions they've all mostly kind of converged at this point and React's virtual DOM objects are just about a de facto standard.

(I've done a tiny bit of virtual DOM meta-programming over the years for various reasons. It's more pleasant than you would expect. TSX has a lot of useful type information for it, even.)