edit: the mental model is instant: it's just javascript for reals. do anything you want in javascript using real js primitives. it's not about looking pretty, jsx doesn't. it's about not relearning basic programming primitives in a made up _markup_ language.
my issue with angular is it's neither real html nor any programming language. its made up pseudo-programming language for no other reason than it fools people into thinking "it's just HTML". that's my gripe.
There's not a difference in capability of expression of the two models. It seems to be a purely aesthetic or comfort difference.
I guess different people like different things.
For example with any iterator/loop you may want to filter, or find, or transform. in ruby you have the entire Enumerable API to dig into or Array prototype for js.
a templating language would have to reimplement functionality one by one in an allow list.
it's just fatigue at that point, yet another API i've got to mentally track.
edit: of course if you export the view data "clean" before hand it compels you to not have intense logic in the view. I get that but after a decade+ in product, views are never pure, even just ability to highlight the active tab takes conditional and select logic in a loop.
I would rather that all the developers were "encouraged" to do the filtering and sorting in some kind of logic block rather than having an attractive footgun lying around that makes it easy to cram in one more last data adjustment.
To each their own I suppose.
Angular and vue's template language are no more made up than JSX is.
`v-bind:id` and `@click.prevent` are something else. There is nothing like this in JSX. It’s not HTML. It’s not JavaScript. It’s some other language.
React _is_ a whole new way of thinking. Back in the days of jQuery it was very painful to stitch together web experience across HTML+CSS+JS. jquery provided much needed DX around utilities to navigate across these pieces. But it was still way too easy to treat HTML like your database and model user-state across a Frankenstein of server, json, html, and javascript.
React was a paradigm shift. "Screw it, everything is javascript." The web depends on js runtime, we know we're going to need it. It starts to makes the best future-forward sense to use the only full programming runtime available. From DX pov this was spectacular to speed up prototyping. And you can finally truly model state purely from data.
What followed was a huge a mess (redux), but I always say, what do we expect? The web is a mess, and it's great because it's useful. Humans are a mess!
--- VUE: similar to angular I just don't align with "super-powered html attributes". It just doesn't make sense as a mental model. Because it's _not_ HTML spec and HTML is not a programming language. The more powerful the framework gets the more we reinvent a pseudo-programming language _through_ HTML. Angular was full-stop a no-go when I first saw it's for-loops in HTML.