Development with React is becoming similar to old school event driven desktop apps, thankfully.
If I want a fancy drop-down with accessibility support and theming etc, there's probably 50 different libraries with components I can pull in and use with little fuss. A few lines of code to import and register event listeners.
I was a huge user of jQuery for years, and it also has quite nice UI libraries. But the power of React is the standardized scaffold and lifecycle. I can pull in UI components from almost any library and use them intuitively. Mix and match them on the same page.
Trying to do that in jQuery will quickly drag you to hell.
If I want a fancy drop-down with accessibility support and theming etc, there's probably 50 different libraries with components I can pull in and use with little fuss. A few lines of code to import and register event listeners.
I was a huge user of jQuery for years, and it also has quite nice UI libraries. But the power of React is the standardized scaffold and lifecycle. I can pull in UI components from almost any library and use them intuitively. Mix and match them on the same page.
Trying to do that in jQuery will quickly drag you to hell.