It seems to me that Facebook has put out many many open source libraries, but React is the only one that has taken off in a bigway outside FB. People generally scoffed at FB technically since they were built on PHP.
I think bringing the functional programming approach and princinpled state management to frontend was just something that the time was ripe for.
(Also React was much different back then, before hooks, etc).
Yeah, I've done it many times successfully, drag and drop interfaces, form builders, dynamic form inputs, animations, etc. It's 10x easier with vanilla JS and sprinklings of jQuery.
Believe it or not, gmail was a much faster cleaner better interface before they switched to Angular, and FB worked much better and was way less buggy and slow before they switched to React. The reason the mega-caps pushed their use was to offload processing power to the client, which saves them server costs. Front end JS frameworks don't solve a problem almost every other company has, hence why they had to be pushed by FB/Google, and didn't grow organically from the open source community.
I suspect when you want complex modals and chat dialogs you'll notice jQuery starting to bend under the weight. It can be done, though not as well as more modern, albeit large frontend tools.