Not sure how useful this is IRL, but it's pretty elegant, for being able to reproduce both JSX and React's hook style in so little code. Rather than a React alternative per se (since this obviously lacks a vDOM), it almost feels like it could fill a similar role that Knockout did back in the day: making it easy to add some interactivity to a page in a more declarative way than plain DOM handling, but without bringing in a full framework.
Here's a codepen if anyone else wants to try it out: https://codepen.io/mubou/pen/pvvWyGO