110% agree here. Sometimes I just need a simple selector/UI event lib and don't want to fart around with the verbosity of vanilla JS - so I still pull jQuery (slimmed) in for a some things these days. It's non-opinionated with how I use it and it's almost universally understood by JS frontend devs. It's also very cross-platform friendly.
Now for Angular, React, Vue, etc. Some are less opinionated than others, but I spend too much time thinking about how to do something elegantly within the constraints of the framework to "follow suit" with their established best practices.
ALSO - I've seen FAR too many of these frameworks fall out of favor over the years: Knockout, Backbone, blah blah. My product lifecycle requires 3-10 years worth of forward maintenance/support/features and for the last decade jQuery is/has been the most stable and widely adopted option. (think Debian stable sorta mentality - I still have 1.* in the wild... on purpose for legacy browser support)
> For example, I'm shocked how many simple static sites are built with React.
Man - me too. It's like using a pneumatic hammer for a roofing nail. I mean, it works ... but why...?