I would like to posit that it’s actually JSX that people like and not React. JSX was always the friend that she told you not to worry about.

When are we done adding everything into the browser API?

If you built React into the web platform, what I'd expect is everyone would stop using it the moment a big new version of React came out, and it'd eventually get deprecated and removed.

There has been long running complaints about how many UI frameworks there are, and how often they change. It's settled down some, but I don't expect that situation to change for a long while.

We'd need a good API for UI components to go with it

Stop adding more complexity to the browser and making it even more impossible to build a new browser from scratch.

Need a DOM snapshot API too.

Where's the code?

I disagree on the general principle of adding APIs -- the platform suffers not from lack of APIs, when you really think about it, but from "another API to rule them all". It's frankly a similar fallacy that struck Microsoft where they were for a long time stuck having to support every API their seniors and interns ever invented -- none of which seem to be sufficient, apparently.

The solution to the "bro, just one more API, please" is to design a _transparent_ platform that is well able to "delegate" programming of new features (e.g. one implementing your favourite templating API) to third-parties in a manner that maintains their "first class citizen" status. WebAssembly was a move in that direction because it's a generic platform that in part supercedes and otherwise supplants the mess that JavaScript has to manage bridging the originally "kiddie script" application software domain, with the native functionality the browser may be encapsulating (also for performance).

Case in point: FFMpeg may be compiled to a WebAssembly module, which gives you arbitrary video/audio encoding/decoding -- pending correct design of bit-blitting so the decoded output can be efficiently transferred to the screen/speakers (which, for much of the reasons I am trying to outline, _is_ the bottleneck of the entire solution).

We need more of the same kind of thinking. Stop begging Web browser vendors / w3C / WHATWG for more features that are just lipstick on a pig -- sit down, think about what kind of feature(s) would allow the Web platform to finally escape the death spiral it's been in since its inception -- albeit one with a large enough radius it's meant to never actually resemble a spiral.

I don't know if I am making myself clear here, but in much simpler terms: why should there be another piece of code that caters to "most" (because you happen to be a FP/React zealot, for better or for worse) when these people can ostensibly write such templating system themselves, publish it on e.g. NPM and/or pull it and use it from there?

The time has been right for Yonkers -

no point pushing declarative sugar again into a system that's already kinda moved on. native templating not fixing real pain = state sync, fine grained reactivity, perf edge cases. we might need a browser level primitives that let lib authors build better abstractions without the payload tax. we maynot need another xsl reboot