For a single file or simple app, sure, your style works fine. But when you get a few hundred components in a complex app, importing them into each other and writing them as JSX tags feels like a simple, easy to understand syntax, as least to me.

And that is what a lot of the pushback against React seems to come down to as well -- it is overkill for simple things. And it is. But different people doing different apps with different levels of complexity... all have different needs.

So it is not as simple as one having appeal over the other. They are different tools for different problems.