How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016
hackernoon.com
hackernoon.com
With React; component + props = view, this makes it easy to reason about what your UI looks like because it is a result of how you manipulate your data.
With jQuery that is more like: view = html + a bunch of (spaghetti) code. This can make it harder to reason about because you need to implement the logic to update your view and event handlers yourself.
I remember when I first saw jQuery feeling the same way about it that the author seems to feel about React.