> I personally find “the HTML is a function of its inputs, internal state, and nothing else” to be a much more predictable model for writing large web applications than, “anybody anywhere in your code can pull the rug from under you arbitrarily with jQuery”, and for that alone I prefer the React development experience.

Respectfully, that's not at all what HTML is supposed to be, but even so, as it turns out, sometimes you do need state to drill pretty deep down (say you need an icon to be green if you're authenticated). So people started just passing state as props everywhere, but oh no that's an anti-pattern. So now people are using redux, mobx, or the context API to do essentially the exact same thing. Three new tools were developed by dozens of engineers to basically re-invent "global state." It's ludicrous.