But React is now probably about 7-8 years old. Is it really this shiny new technology that "everyone must jump to"? Yes jQuery devs probably don't get a lot of work right now, and yes you probably should keep up with React itself.

But I don't think that it is necessary to literally switch technology every 1-2 years to keep up, if we can use React (or Vue) which has been stable for a while and is still wildly popular.