It's quite simple to handle that situation with jQuery and modules. If many parts of you code need to make a change to the DOM in the same place, you wrap the DOM changing in a module.

  var widget = require('./widget');
  widget.foo('bar');

And the widget handles the jQuery'ing for you.

  module.exports = {
    foo: function(s) { $('.widget').text(s) }
  }

Only:

- it breaks immediately if there is more than one '.widget' on the page

- your app will get out-of-sync DOM updates because different parts will flush changes to the DOM at different times (React is DOM = f(state, time), so if multiple changes happen in f, they all be flushed to DOM in one go)