I had the same experience building a SPA with jQuery. Updating the view and keeping it in sync was atrocious.

I also made the mistake of making a non SPA recently, using jQuery on the front end. It's a nightmare. I did this so a friend could collaborate and learn, but I really dread writing code for the front end anymore.

Coming back to the old ways from Angular, Backbone, etc feels like a HUGE step backwards in terms of the amount of time. Like if for some reason I decided to ride a horse instead of drive a car.