It's an unpoular opinion, but I feel that React et al are just a way for Facebook to gain developer mindshare. Likewise how Angular is a play for Google to gain developer mindshare. The big guys want developers locked into their ecosystems. It's a play out of Microsoft's book.

When you realize that none of these frameworks are even an improvement over jQuery, it becomes clear what the true motivation is.

Well, IMO, React is much better than building the equivalent in jQuery.

I once thought that too. But after working under a jQuery ninja I learned that it's far more powerful than most people give it credit for. More importantly, it's significantly easier to reason about DOM changes in jQuery vs other frameworks because there's no magic at all.

For example, here is a SQLite playground that I built with a friend https://sql.glitch.me/. The entire frontend is only 100 lines of Javascript thanks to jQuery. I'd love to see what the React implementation looks like.

Pretty sure no one really doubted jQuery power.. it's about maintainability, state management, modularization.

If you tinker hard enough, you can achieve those with jQuery, but it'll never be as easy as React.

Also, your site doesn't load (project not found)

I guess we just disagree over whether or not all that is made easier with React. I have worked on large jQuery codebases that do everything you mentioned: they are maintainable, they manage state in a comprehensive fashion, and they are modularized.

JavaScript Fatigue inducing media tries to taint jQuery calling it all sorts of things but that hasn't stopped me. Sure you need to learn and use a handful of useful patterns to build with it, but it's the same situation if you want to make proper use of any framework.

And I updated the url for my demo :)

I don't find that important, but I find that it means

1) This is probably a project I want to check out, if it pertains to my stack, and

2) This is probably going to stick around and not be unsupported very soon.

I would be just as happy if FB hadn't developed it, and instead it was just used by them. (Or any other of maybe a dozen big camps) Or if it was just used by a whole lot of people.

Widespread use is a pretty good metric for what library to choose, when you aren't familiar with the landscape.

It isn't. But if something is run by a major company wouldn't you want to know?

It's important because a lot more gets done when multiple people are being paid to work on bugs & features full-time than when it's, say, one person trying to find some spare time in their evenings.