Websites were much more varied and creative in the jQuery era, and even more so in the Flash era that came before. Different interaction paradigms, wild animations, full-screen effects, etc etc. Not necessarily "better", but React didn't really enable anything we couldn't have before - even today when real performance is required you will resort to canvas/webgl, alternative rendering approaches and skipping react's render cycle.
React was never [1] fast [2] - that is one of the biggest misconceptions in frontend development in the last decade.
[2] https://css-tricks.com/radeventlistener-a-tale-of-client-sid...