Chalk it up to different perspectives.

I - being old as dirt - was also around for it. Circa 2002 or 2003, we were writing CMSs in PHP which were already well beyond the simplistic concept of rendering HTML tables from database columns. Smarty templates were pretty common back then. It's hard to treat these templates as "writing HTML by hand" because the templates are a higher level of abstraction.

Rails was quite popular, but I never got into it. I went from PHP to Python (avoiding Django) and then to nodeJS. At the time, the MVC architecture was making a comeback, but the mapping of HTML/CSS/JS was never 1:1 with it. Small fragments of HTML and CSS where always littering the JS or PHP/Python. The clean separation was never fully realized. For this reason, JSX was seen as a real win.

The reason I chose to focus specifically on "templates and DSLs" in my original comment is because once the level of abstraction is raised to the point where HTML becomes a compilation target, it is no longer HTML by definition. The browser cannot render the template or DSL without the preprocessor (XSLT is about as close as that ever got). This is especially true with client-side templates. For example, using pre-made widgets like jQuery date pickers is so far removed from writing HTML that a reasonable conclusion is that jQuery developers do not know HTML or JavaScript as a matter of course [1]. But yeah, this was all burgeoning in the early/mid 2000's, and really kicked into full throttle with jQuery.

> It was very easy back then to browse most of the web with JavaScript disabled.

It was easier, but not fool-proof. Client-side rendering wasn't in full swing, but Java Applets, Shockwave, and Flash certainly were in the years leading up to it.

[1]: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-people-who-know-jQuery-b...