I do not question if it is high-level as much as I do its practicality. jQuery manipulates the DOM, React manipulates a virtual DOM pushing the changes to the client. That's about as vanilla as it gets.
Could you be a little more descriptive? If you're talking about creating a more visually appealing UI/UX experience, are you talking about creating a framework that more effectively handles UI component state?
Maybe I'm missing something and am way off base.