It's a mix of a lot of relatively good choices/trade-offs from the React team.
I've been doing GUI apps for long enough to have seen a few attempts in a variety of IDEs (and languages). I like React exactly for this reason - that it models what they've done with components, but in a way that is more robust and flexible. IDEs tend to come and go but JSX as a language seems to have grown beyond React. It's a relatively good way of describing UI that can be read and understood while leaving ample space for dynamic composability which has historically been an issue to represent in the IDE UI builders I've used. I've usually had to resort to mixing UI builders and own code, or giving up on the UI builder entirely and instantiate classes myself.
I like React because of the trade-offs. It's not perfect. It's just imperfect in some acceptable ways.
I've been doing GUI apps for long enough to have seen a few attempts in a variety of IDEs (and languages). I like React exactly for this reason - that it models what they've done with components, but in a way that is more robust and flexible. IDEs tend to come and go but JSX as a language seems to have grown beyond React. It's a relatively good way of describing UI that can be read and understood while leaving ample space for dynamic composability which has historically been an issue to represent in the IDE UI builders I've used. I've usually had to resort to mixing UI builders and own code, or giving up on the UI builder entirely and instantiate classes myself.
I like React because of the trade-offs. It's not perfect. It's just imperfect in some acceptable ways.