Lots of good comments, but I notice a lot of people fall into the trap of thinking “I’m not doing anything fancy, I’ll just use jQuery instead”.

Problem is that whatever starts out as nothing fancy soon becomes more complex due to scope creep or underestimating the complexity of the DOM-state you need to manage. I often feel that most of the jQuery code I’ve written is just managing DOM-state. And it’s fine, if all you want to do is filter a pre-rendered list based on a couple of buttons and an input-field. Suddenly though you want to update that list in real-time based on websockets or periodic fetching, or something different.

React and Vue can be really lightweight, you don’t need the whole kitchen sink, and it manages the DOM for you - eg. you get to write the code that adds business value. I’ve written both simple and complex stuff in jQuery, and after trying react a few years back I never looked back. Then I was handed some legacy XSLT stylesheet where they wanted to add some simple search functionality to a pre-rendered list, but jeez, the scope creep. We went from maybe 20 lines of jQuery to around 120. I don’t think a tiny React or Vue app would have been shorter, but it would have been more manageable. Debugging would make sense, and implementation time would have been at least half. There’s something to be said for making the job easier for the next guy as well. With jQuery it’s just selectors and magic, you need to understand how it affects the DOM as well. In React and Vue you make tiny components that are easy to reason about in isolation, and as long as you don’t make a mess of it it’s easy to reason about it when it scales too.

Angular 4 is a lot like React, but it tacks a lot of extra stuff on that you don’t need for simple applications and makes it harder to get into. For full blown apps you get most of what you need (making a React stack from scratch is often very time consuming and wasteful with lots of refactoring and changing libraries that didn’t do enough or too much - at least if it’s your first full blown react project) and the benefit of writing it in typescript too.