[Zanfa]

> For the life of me I don’t understand why people absolutely insist on using JavaScript to render HTML. Backend frameworks do HTmL just fine.

There’s an entire universe of front-end developers who don’t even know JavaScript. React is the only thing they’ve ever touched and they’re completely helpless without it.

[jfengel]

You can't write React without Javascript. Even the most basic React demos require you to write JS, if only to increment a counter.

Perhaps they don't really "know" the entire monstrosity of Javascript, but that's a tall order. JS is such a big language, with so many redundant features, that most developers will use only a fraction of it.