This mess was why people hated front-end programming. It has only been a year or two since Angular/React became mainstream and allowed us to think of state as plain JS objects. Lest we forget, it was truly bad times before.
Angular did the same but went on a different path: watching the state (scope) for changes and then digesting the resulting spaghetti updates
React users are simply adopting well known techniques from functional programming languages because they work well with the virtual dom concept. Except for that concept, there is nothing new being invented here.
Until you try to build a large app and get murdered by maintainability problems (eg. treating the DOM as a store of mutable state, managing event listener binding lifecycles, etc) and performance issues (eg. DOM reads and writes to occurring in an interleaved fashion inside inner loops)
You obviously haven't worked on any legacy app built in jQuery.