React is just so, so much nicer to work with. It's easy to be dismissive if you've never had to develop UIs with jQuery and didn't experience yourself the transition to React which is a million times better in terms of developer experience.

I feel like people that don't build UIs themselves think of them too much in a completely functional way as in "it's just buttons and form inputs that do X", and forget about the massive complexity, edge cases, aesthetic requirements, accessibility, rendering on different viewports, huge statefulness, and so on.