[samizdatum]

Razor is really quite different from React.

Razor seems to have been born out of a frustration someone had with writing

  return "<div>" + model.name + "</div>";

Razor is basically a DSL for C# string concatenation, where everything not escaped with an @ is a string literal to be concatenated. This means it's fairly unopinionated about structuring code. React, on the other hand, forces you to define components- ideally, pure functions from properties to JSX (which is just sugar for JS). This means composition is the default solution to everything. Razor doesn't place nearly as much emphasis on composable components, and the mechanisms it has for doing so, like helpers or calls to RenderPartial, are clunky and worlds away from the first-class component support of React.

While it's technically possible to write Razor code with a React-style focus on composition, the syntax and architecture of viewmodels/templates actively pushes you away from doing so. In my experience, most Razor ends up like a C# translation of PHP, and I think that's really the paradigm Razor inherited. Razor has been around since 2011, which significantly predates the Cambrian explosion of clientside js frameworks, so it makes sense.

[TranquilMarmot]

Good point that it's hard to write nice and modular views with Razor; helpers and RenderPartial are pretty clunky and overall just hard to manage. I suppose it is pretty PHP-like...