[lloydatkinson]

> Then some "smart" people decided Babel would be a good thing to transform anything and thus React ... and the like were born

Is this a serious comment? You're playing into the typical HN bandwagon of hate on anything web related. React is a library for declarative UI and state management. It doesn't need Babel or even JSX to be used. It can be used in the browser with no build tools at all. Except no one does that, because productivity of tooling is a massive win.

Your complaint about polyfills, transpiling, etc, is just a thinly veiled attack on React because you apparently have some gripe with it.