[lolinder]

1) Type safety for element props.

2) Autocomplete for element props.

3) IDE support such as refactors and jump to definition/jump to usages.

4) Proper syntax highlighting out of the box instead of the editor just saying "there's a string here".

5) A uniform pattern for defining custom components that work the same as primitives, rather than defining custom components as helper functions returning string fragments or something like that.

And so on. JSX has a lot going for it regardless of the semantics chosen. It's just a syntax that is very convenient for lots of kinds of tooling, and it's completely unopinated about the semantic context in which it is used.

[_heimdall]

These are definitely helpful, but what you are describing are all language tool features rather than features of JSX itself. 5 would be the exception, but that is just user preference of what kind of syntax one likes to write components with.

[lolinder]

Well, yes. But OP was asking about what makes this better than `innerHTML`, and the obvious answer is that support for HTML programming embedded in JavaScript strings is generally bad while support for JSX is very good across all editors.