jQuery still boils down to mutating DOM state, forcing you to become a bookkeeper where you have to carefully ensure your App's state and rendered DOM are in co

jQuery still boils down to mutating DOM state, forcing you to become a bookkeeper where you have to carefully ensure your App's state and rendered DOM are in constant sync and you also have to deal with interim state transitions where it's easy to run into bugs for state transitions you've never tested or thought about, which gets complicated quickly. React's Virtual DOM means you only have to care about the representation of a given state and React takes care of transparently and optimally handling all the DOM mutations required to sync the DOM with your App's state. React also has great componentization making it natural and easy to encapsulate reusable logic. The benefits really stand out in medium to large code-bases where it scales much better than jQuery. It's still ok for Apps maintaining little state, but there's a large class of Apps I'd never consider creating in jQuery which I've found trivial to develop with in React.