Yeah I agree that it’s not the best to work with, especially compared to handlebars (which we also use) where you can write HTML as you’d expect.
We started using virtual-dom/virtual-hyperscript in places where we needed to improve performance. The topic of our multiple templating systems has been something we started talking about within the team recently; we don’t have any concrete plans yet, but realize it would be a good idea to simplify. Maybe this means we won’t use virtual-hyperscript anymore? Time will tell.