All what you describe in this commentary is much more easy to implement with just jQuery. Your logic more looks like "I can do it with React so it means I should and I believe it's the best tool".
Until you’ve got some moderately complex state and infrastructure to handle it, where you end up recreating the whole State -> Render loop of React in jQuery. I recently did this. It works, well, and with less bugs than most hacky jQuery DOM modification, but by the end I was pining for any other modern view library that already solved this. Same reason I used to pine for jQuery on some projects.