If what you're primarily building is a web page with light interactivity, there's nothing wrong with jQuery (or a more declarative modern alternative like Alpin

If what you're primarily building is a web page with light interactivity, there's nothing wrong with jQuery (or a more declarative modern alternative like Alpine.js). React et al are intended for applications with enough complexity that trying to manage it procedurally becomes miserable and unmaintainable. There's a lot wrong with how npm is used (primarily the never-ending recursive dependencies making proper auditing of the code you use all but impossible), but including tons of script tags on every page and hoping you got the right plugin order without introducing any conflicts was hardly the pinnacle of development. There are two problems with modern JS, imo. First is all the people insisting you need to use some grotesquely complex setup running on Kubernetes to host a blog that gets a hundred page views per month. The second is that most frontend frameworks want to take over your entire app, and in some cases really want your backend to be running node too. It's usually possible to start small and enhance as you go, but it's not easy.