How can you append children to already declared React elements?

const MyElement = <SomeComponent/>;
MyElement.append(<SomeChild />);
MyElement.append(<AnotherChild />);

An example:

Let's say you're trying to render a 'tree' list, for example a file-navigation where you have an arbitrary number of sub-lists.

Now if you want to this in a depth-first manner, you need a reference to existing nodes, and be able to append children to them.

Example data structure:

Let's assume a bunch of nested Maps here. Each key is a file or folder. Their value is a map of their children.

{
  [Folder_1] => {
    [Folder_1.1] => {
       [File_1.1.1] => null
    }
    [Folder_1.2] => {
       [Folder_1.2.1] => {
         [File_1.2.1.1] => null
       }
       [File_1.2.2] => null
    }
  }
}

Now the React output we want is this:

<FileNavigator>
  <Node node={Folder_1}>
    <Node node={Folder_1.1}>
      <Node node={File_1.1.1}>
    </Node>
  </Node>
  <Node node={Folder_1.2}>
    <Node node={Folder_1.2.1}>
      <Node node={File_1.2.1.1}>
    </Node>
    <Node node={File_1.2.2}>
  </Node>
</FileNavigator>

Note on existing SO answers:

• How to append child to React element?: The answers in this one focus on React.createElement letting you pass a 'children' prop. React.createElement doesn't work for 'depth-first' additions, since it assumes you know all the children at the time the method is called.