That approach (i.e. the jquery style of attach logic to the DOM) just doesn't scale when you're writing a single page app where _everything_ needs to have JS logic attached to it. It turns into a complete mess of imperative UI twiddling and it's extremely easy to forget to update some little element in response to a change.

The bigger question IMHO is if you actually need a SPA. If you don't then yeah the old jquery style (now alpine.js or similar frameworks are spiritual successors) is perfectly fine.