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.