React basically figured out how to make XML work.

Remember, XML was actually designed for use cases like this, that’s why it came with XPath and XSLT, which let you make it executable in a sense by performing arbitrary transformations on an XML tree.

Back in the day, at my first coding job, we had an entire program that had a massive data model encoded in XML, and we used a bunch of XSL to programmatically convert that into Java objects, SQL queries, and HTML forms. Actually worked fairly well, except of course that XSL was an awful language to do that all in.

React simply figured out how to use JavaScript as the transformation language instead.