[mc3]

Correct AFAIK you can't get end to end type safety in Handlebars, in that if you treat a string as an array it will silently not render something, whereas in Typescript / React you would notice.

But... let's forget Handlebars because Typescript/ES6 allows you to write code like this:

    mythings.map(thing = `<li>${thing.name}</li>`).join();

And this is React-free and arguably a lot simpler for the needs of a static site, and actually more flexible as your are controlling the character by character output.

And the question is do I want to pull in not just React but Next.js and learn all of it's ways to do this? I think for a static site no.