jQuery is still around and still useful for a certain class of applications. But to say that jQuery won for rich web apps is to ignore all the churn we went through in frameworks and tooling to finally end up with Webpack, NPM, Babel and React.

React's target is complex apps. It's designed to scale both with application complexity and team size. jQuery never was designed to scale. And anyone who started with jQuery and built a rich single page app will generally tell you of all the imperative pitfalls you'll find.

The thing is, the web has evolved. The simple tools that attracted us to the web when web was mostly a presentation layer just don't cut it.

The "old" web is still there for beginners. If you want to learn to build basic websites without having to learn package management, numerous libraries and frameworks... jQuery is still a great option.

I'm always skeptical of loose analogies. 2017 isn't 2010. React is not Dojo. I'm not even saying React is the end all be all...but it works really well and it will continue to hold its position unless something better comes along that enough people are excited about to beat React's ecosystem.

For beginners there are tools like Next.js and Gatsby which allow you to create server rendered React apps with minimal config, setup, etc.

React also has React Native going for it, which is still young and booming.