I actually found make it restricted (compare to js) improve general code quality as you don't have too much items to abuse. Probably not ideal for personal project because it won't let you fly as you want. But it is awesome for collaboration because you can't really write something way too off with it.

Yea, the 1% of the time you need that extra control then you can easily use JS render function or JSX. The documentation covers all of this: https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/render-function.html

I haven't found it very limiting, however, because it is very well defined, in Vue3 they are looking to actually use this to make massive optimizations in rendering that you simply can't make when you use javascript anyway you like to assemble things.