[augusto-moura]

In ol'times people used BackboneJS[1] for that purpose. And surprisingly enough, it is still being actively supported[2].

If someone is still using jQuery for legacy reasons, BackboneJS might be a good intermediate step before going for a modern framework. Backbone is pretty light and pretty easy to grasp

[1]: https://backbonejs.org/

[2]: https://github.com/jashkenas/backbone/tags

[Izkata]

There was a period where BackboneJS models were used as the datastore for React, before Redux took over. I haven't used it like this myself, but could definitely see it as a way to do an incremental rewrite.