JSX just reverses the story, it's js with islands of html tags thrown in it instead of being html with code in it... in the end when you look at an average presentation component it's still like 90% html tags and some js mixed all together...

JSX is not, and I mean this emphatically not, "HTML tags". They're a tree of objects. That they sometimes represent HTML is orthogonal to why it's fantastic.

To elide all of the power and powerformance that JSX provides in the situations where it's appropriate as just "HTML tags" fundamentally misunderstands what they are and why they are powerful.

Data structures are more than text. This is a good thing.

JSX is data after compilation which means it's not as transparent or accessible programmatically in the same way hiccup is

That said I'm not sure it'd be as easy to do hiccup in pure JS because names aren't a first class data type there

GP could've easily been talking about the many other libraries/frameworks that DO use templating, though: Template Syntax in Angular/Vue, Glimmer in Ember, etc.