Yep, exactly. I use Umbrella JS (author here!) for most side projects. I only reach for React for SPA and state-heavy projects. These cases with jQuery (or Umbrella JS) is tricky because while you can do it with template strings, you don't get the modularity, build tools and it's difficult to protect against XSS.

You have to be very, very careful with .html(...) and only for that reason sometimes React is worth it, specially with SPA. But for small-to-mid sizes projects, Umbrella JS FTW!