You mean 15 years ago? jQuery gives you a list of helpers to manually mutate the DOM and style. Angular1/React allows you to declare a variable and to mutate the DOM and style automatically when that variable changes. Takes 10x less lines of code to achieve the same thing and it doesn't break if someone changes an id on a div. Angular1/React also gives you the framework to write reusable components.

It might not matter for a quick side project over the weekend, but it changes everything for a complex app with 10k+ LOC developed by several people and maintained over the years.

I switched from Angular1 to React 10 years ago because React is mostly standard JavaScript (I never need to open the React docs since I know how to write a function, a loop and a condition in JavaScript and I remember how to use React's core methods useState & useEffect) while Angular1 has hundreds of methods and DSL syntaxes to remember.