[calvin]

For faster initial render and SEO purposes it's important for many sites to render their content on the server first. React may not be targeted primarily at this type of application, but it's a legitimate use case for the author to consider and address.

[catpolice]

Absolutely, but at the same time, sacrificing client side rendering performance isn't the answer, and some of his suggestions about how he wishes React worked would involve doing just that. The author's complaint isn't that server-side rendering is harmfully impacted, it's that JSX has some expressively awkward bits. But it has some of those awkward bits because it more or less has to if React is going to work as well as it does on the client side. JSX was designed the way that it was to enable client-side functionality, and the author doesn't seem to acknowledge that, so it seems like he's criticizing without fully understanding.