Good point about the whitespace, but I'd still rather have the templates inside my code than separate the two, mentally parsing two separate languages with different syntax and stitching them together is a lot more mental overhead IMO.
It's a matter of personal opinion, but I guess I'm more used to server-side templating languages, which Vue's looks much more similar to. I have the same problem as you for JSX - I keep trying to read it as HTML, except it's not, and mentally translating it is annoying.
i assure you, you will get over that phase real quickly. you will come to appreciate how nicer it is to write your code this way. because the same thing happened to me.
