I think react makes a good case for the `kidnapped by Jeff Bezos to work on applications` situation. I find the simple way that you can just render things and not have to worry about DOM manipulation to be very freeing.
Agreed. Once you know React it's incredibly quick to throw something together (especially if you use Material UI or similar). jQuery is definitely simpler but the props/state model of React means fewer bugs slip through the cracks when you're in a hurry.
(and my usual disclaimer - if you're going to use React for a quick project, you can probably use Preact and save the extra bloat)
React completely removes the need for jQuery if you're using it correctly, because you should rarely if ever touch the DOM, and jQuery is... a DOM manipulation library.
jQuery nowadays is much more than DOM manipulation lib. In the latest version it gives the promises that are compatible with Promises/A+ spec. It has the powerful ajax calls functions.
I mean instead of adding polyfills for "fetch" api and "es6 promises" that brings a gazillion dependencies with them, one can simply add jquery package that has ZERO runtime dependencies(https://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/master/package.json) and have ajax calls, promises and much, much more out of the box. I love jQuery.
1 dependency that's 34.6KB minified. That's a lot more than the two separate dependencies, and besides, once you've gone to the trouble of adding a package.json to add one dependency, adding one more is a very small step.
