I think you've nailed it. It does come down to user preference.
React _is_ a whole new way of thinking. Back in the days of jQuery it was very painful to stitch together web experience across HTML+CSS+JS. jquery provided much needed DX around utilities to navigate across these pieces. But it was still way too easy to treat HTML like your database and model user-state across a Frankenstein of server, json, html, and javascript.
React was a paradigm shift. "Screw it, everything is javascript." The web depends on js runtime, we know we're going to need it. It starts to makes the best future-forward sense to use the only full programming runtime available. From DX pov this was spectacular to speed up prototyping. And you can finally truly model state purely from data.
What followed was a huge a mess (redux), but I always say, what do we expect? The web is a mess, and it's great because it's useful. Humans are a mess!
---
VUE: similar to angular I just don't align with "super-powered html attributes". It just doesn't make sense as a mental model. Because it's _not_ HTML spec and HTML is not a programming language. The more powerful the framework gets the more we reinvent a pseudo-programming language _through_ HTML. Angular was full-stop a no-go when I first saw it's for-loops in HTML.
Neither react's JSX nor vue's template language are HTML. But rejecting vue's template on grounds that it's not HTML seems odd. React's JSX deviates from HTML in many ways. Like class vs className. XML self-closing vs HTML self-closing. onchange vs oninput. On purely aesthetic grounds, I can't understand how the react idiom of array.map() would ever be preferable to an affordance in the (non-HTML) template language for handling this normal standard thing that always happens.
it's not about feigning html purity it's the opposite. Why pretend we're using HTML when it's not? so with react it becomes a js flavor, jsx, which some people hate but it's very clear that it's a made up language IN real javascript.
edit: the mental model is instant: it's just javascript for reals. do anything you want in javascript using real js primitives. it's not about looking pretty, jsx doesn't. it's about not relearning basic programming primitives in a made up _markup_ language.
my issue with angular is it's neither real html nor any programming language. its made up pseudo-programming language for no other reason than it fools people into thinking "it's just HTML". that's my gripe.
Completely agree with you. Every time I see yet another template language adding some clumsy for-each loop syntax I sigh. Just let us use a normal programming language. As an example I give you every template system ever invented. Devops tooling is full of them.
Over the years, I've seen a few posts like this that seem to take it as a given that a loop in a normal programming language is better than foreach capability in a template language. Certainly enough times to believe that a significant group of people actually believe it's superior.
There's not a difference in capability of expression of the two models. It seems to be a purely aesthetic or comfort difference.
It's because native programming language will defacto allow you to hack it to its natural limit. A tendency most all programmers have given they even get into programming.
For example with any iterator/loop you may want to filter, or find, or transform. in ruby you have the entire Enumerable API to dig into or Array prototype for js.
a templating language would have to reimplement functionality one by one in an allow list.
it's just fatigue at that point, yet another API i've got to mentally track.
edit: of course if you export the view data "clean" before hand it compels you to not have intense logic in the view. I get that but after a decade+ in product, views are never pure, even just ability to highlight the active tab takes conditional and select logic in a loop.
I would rather that all the developers were "encouraged" to do the filtering and sorting in some kind of logic block rather than having an attractive footgun lying around that makes it easy to cram in one more last data adjustment.
JSX also fools people into thinking "it's HTML in javascript". I've heard several co-workers say this. JSX is a made up language as well. It's not javascript. That's why you need a build step to parse the syntax.
Angular and vue's template language are no more made up than JSX is.
React _is_ a whole new way of thinking. Back in the days of jQuery it was very painful to stitch together web experience across HTML+CSS+JS. jquery provided much needed DX around utilities to navigate across these pieces. But it was still way too easy to treat HTML like your database and model user-state across a Frankenstein of server, json, html, and javascript.
React was a paradigm shift. "Screw it, everything is javascript." The web depends on js runtime, we know we're going to need it. It starts to makes the best future-forward sense to use the only full programming runtime available. From DX pov this was spectacular to speed up prototyping. And you can finally truly model state purely from data.
What followed was a huge a mess (redux), but I always say, what do we expect? The web is a mess, and it's great because it's useful. Humans are a mess!
--- VUE: similar to angular I just don't align with "super-powered html attributes". It just doesn't make sense as a mental model. Because it's _not_ HTML spec and HTML is not a programming language. The more powerful the framework gets the more we reinvent a pseudo-programming language _through_ HTML. Angular was full-stop a no-go when I first saw it's for-loops in HTML.