> There is no "React way" to query the position and size of elements, so interactivity has to be implemented the old-school way, by interacting with real DOM.

> There is no "React way" to query the position and size of elements, so interactivity has to be implemented the old-school way, by interacting with real DOM. I have helped build an interactive timeline web app where we explicitly placed elements on the page and moved them around based on user interactions. We did this with react and no jquery. >React is great for rendering, but you can’t implement direct-manipulation on top of virtual DOM. Direct-manipulation means interactively resizing, drag & drop and so on. There are react "drag and drop" libraries that have no dependency on jquery and don't break the react lifecycle for the elements. For example https://github.com/react-dnd/react-dnd https://github.com/react-dnd/react-dnd Maybe i'm not following what you are saying but I haven't encountered something that required me to use jquery and I've built some pretty ambitious interfaces.