Completely agree. jQuery gave us a level playing field when manipulating DOM and even CSS from one browser to another was different: jQuery was effectively a DOM abstraction that allowed us to UI manipulation code once. Between that time and now the browser vendors have been hard at work actually making their rendering engines compliant with standards like HTML5, CSS3, and ECMAScript.now which is a huge boon to writers of libraries for making user interfaces, of which React is one.
My hope for the future is that web components will reach a point where the same component can be dropped into any front-end framework (Angular, Aurelia, Ember, React, Vue, etc) such that UI composition and layout libraries, components, and client-side application logic are self-contained and the libraries in which they are implemented can be swapped out with minimal effort.