React is great for rendering (and updating after initial render), but if your app is highly interactive then jQuery makes things easier even when using React for rendering.
You generally don't mix react and JQuery. The event system + JSX makes jQuery obsolete.
Having worked in complex interactive React/Angular apps as well as ones using JQuery, nobody would ever offer me enough to use JQuery again for this use case. They would have to double my pay for all the pain
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 you want some specific code to criticise, there's dozens of dropdown menu widgets available: here's one I found in Google https://github.com/react-component/menu since I've never actually had reason to use a js/html drop down menu widget.
Here's one that uses jQuery. See how much simpler it is? The one you found does have more functionality, but try rewriting the one I found in React without using jQuery. I guarantee it will be much more complicated.
It’s interesting that you find this “simpler”. One of the great advantages of React is that is declarative, it’s easy to understand how a component will render given a set of (props, state). Your example is quite the opposite, the render method violates this principle and each event handler manipulates the DOM using a ref. I’d call this spaghetti-React.
It's not about how complex the component is. In my experience what matters is how easy it is to use. With React it's easy to build a world in a teacup, and that's mostly a good thing.
For "regular CRUD developers", the vast majority of us, I have zero concern about how big or crazy component code is until it's so huge it impacts page size. I'll use the easiest most feature complete library out there.
React does encapsulation like jQuery never could. I don't care if I have this vanta black box on my page as long as it's easy to mess with and gets the job done
"I have zero concern about how big or crazy component code is until it's so huge it impacts page size." Me and my mobile browser would like to have a few words with you. Not everything that can execute JS is a supercomputer...performance still matters.
you are seriously mistaken about react then.
The whole point of MV libs is that you maintain a model (domain and/or UI) and the UI just redraws itself. JQuery is 100% not needed even for the most complicated React apps.
When you have a highly interactive component you're going to need to make a lot of DOM calls to get the current state of the elements and so on. jQuery makes this easy. The benefits of jQuery over making raw DOM calls have been mentioned by many people here already, so I won't repeat them. These benefits of jQuery don't go away even in a React app.
Having worked in complex interactive React/Angular apps as well as ones using JQuery, nobody would ever offer me enough to use JQuery again for this use case. They would have to double my pay for all the pain