[gen220]

I’d say they scratch different itches. jquery helps you write better js, the same JS you may have been writing for two decades.

React is, from my perspective, an attempt to abstract away a lot of DOM, with the objective of decreasing the size of the solution space to common problems.

The idea is that two engineers working in two different parts of a company would write more or less the same code in react, whereas the jquery solutions would have been very divergent. React enforces patterns and makes it harder to write bad code. That’s the dream, at least!

I wouldn’t compare the two directly, they’re solving totally different problems. Jquery makes writing vanilla JS less verbose. React is more like an engine that’s written in JS and programmable with JS, with the goal of making browser code more composable and opinionated (wrt data flow).