While directionally correct, the article spends a lot of time glorifying jquery and not enough on what a horrible, no good, unoptimized mess of a framework jquery was, and by extension what kinds of websites were built back then. I remember those times well. The reason to use React isn't because it was new, far from it. It was because it won vs. Ember, Angular, et. al. in 2014-2015? as the best abstraction because it was easiest to reason about. It still wasn't great. In fact, still isn't great. But it's the best blend of many leaky abstractions we use to code against the browser apis.