Discussion on: What in the Heck is JSX ?

JSX is not created by React, it's an extension of the ECMAScript. You can use React without JSX but here is why most don't.

It was invented by the same team which invented React. See facebook.github.io/jsx/

JSX is an XML-like syntax extension to ECMAScript without any defined semantics. It's NOT intended to be implemented by engines or browsers. It's NOT a proposal to incorporate JSX into the ECMAScript spec itself. It's intended to be used by various preprocessors (transpilers) to transform these tokens into standard ECMAScript.