Missed this but - there’s a very meaningful difference between templates and React at least how most people think of templates.

React lets you return dynamic tree structures and insert code anywhere inline in that structure. Most templates explicitly don’t allow that for good reason. Further, most but not all templating frameworks have special syntax for conditional logic and loops.

If JSX is templating then templating has no meaning. Would createElement() be a template? In that case all functional programming is.