If you are moving onto an old jquery style codebase (via inheriting/changing job) Vue.js can be used as a straight drop in library via a script tag and you can start unsouping that jquery mess.

It also reminds me a lot of a spiritual successor to KnockoutJS (which was/is my favourite JS clientside tool still).

React.js is probably the most similar popular framework because of its one-way data binding. Vue's creator (Evan You) wrote a Comparison with Other Frameworks (http://vuejs.org/v2/guide/comparison.html) that's worth reading. Dan Abramov, co-author of Redux, helped keep the comparison with React grounded.

Vue is a reactive JS framework, similar to React or Angular. It's lighter weight, but comes with less built in. It's a very nice framework to work with, easy to get up and running, but powerful enough to build a full featured web app.

The business benefit is going to be subject to a lot of debate. In principle though, it's that it's less time to implement.

Is there any objective reason to prefer vue over react or is it mostly a subjective preference?

I believe it is a React/Angular/Ember/Backbone/jQuery alternative ...