You're missing OP's point. The website can be fully static (even without any JS) but you could still use JSX/React to generate it (during build time, not runtime).

If you've ever had to build a static website from scratch, with the same navigation, footer etc. on each page, and without using frames, then you'll appreciate the amount of work that a templating engine saves you (whether JS-based or else).

Static doesn’t mean no JavaScript. Usually it means it’s not rendered on the server.

Every time i start making a static website, i end up needing to include a table (or some other structured display of data) and then just switch to JSX to render the data with a loop. Sometimes i then render it as html and deploy, and sometimes i deploy it as react. But that’s how i usually end up using React even when static.

React is completely happy to spit out a DOM tree as HTML for you; wiring up the in-browser JavaScript side of React is optional. This is how static site generators like Gatsby or NextJS work (with some hacks that as a user you don't really care about) and (eliding some detail) how React Server Components now work generally. I've also used it to generate email templates[1] with some success, too.

I use JSX because it's a nicer templating system than EJS or similar. It allows me to write components to encapsulate reused fragments rather than text manipulation. And I like it, which counts for something.

Candidly, this is something that people who fulminate about React probably should know before they start talking.

[1] - https://github.com/eropple/rx-mailer

Obviously there's a spectrum. A static website just means the files are served statically from a folder, and routing is just the folder path. You can still serve JS files and have a static website. If you put an alert on a button, you're not suddenly a SPA

Generally, a static website refers to any website where the server just serves files rather than running application code for each request. JS runs on the client.

For example, I've been working on a character generator for the Inquisitor tabletop game. It's completely static because I just SFTP the build output to my webserver, but it uses React and JSX.

You can render JSX at build-time. So it's just a templating language, as the parent comment said.

You use JSX the same way you'd use PHP - it just compiles into HTML. In this case, you just save the output after compiling it once. (as you can with the dozens or hundreds of non-JS options that do the same)

Because they only know JS and it’s ecosystem.

You totally can, but for my money that's kinda not great. Because HTML isn't your "templating language", PHP et al are, and you aren't templating around the DOM with typed objects, you're templating around text with all the pitfalls that entails. Object structures save time, reduce errors, and give you more to-the-programmer natural tools for composition and reuse (just call a function that returns a JSX object! give it typed parameters! declare victory and go have beers!).

I wouldn't go back to doing text manipulation to generate HTML, because I value not having to make sure I've escaped all my quotes.

Sure, I like TypeScript and componentization though which JSX can give me where PHP doesn't. Most templating languages are dynamically typed.

PHP pages absolutely have to be built/rendered.