Eh. "10 times" is certainly possible, but it's not inevitable. Maybe the strongest load bearing statement in the GP is "If it ends up sucking, it's because I made it suck."

> With jQuery you've gotta do something like jQuery('.this').hide();

Sure, at some level, you're going to have define a relationship between your data and some display element (`jQuery('.this')` above), mechanisms for managing presence & visibility among other characteristics (`.hide()` in this case), and wiring that to state.

React is a set of shortcuts and conventions for doing this. It's a decent solution and saves on thinking about how to organize code for this task, and more important saves on bad thinking about how to organize an application (a savings that multiplies the larger the team working on it and range of experience within).

But it's certainly possible to write plain old JS (augmented with jQuery for convenience, if you like) where you define that relationship between your data and display element and accompanying mechanisms once and all the data->UI flow is encapsulated in functions where you don't worry about DOM specifics.

There's some marginal increase in verbosity, and you have to be the person who enforces the conventions (which is usually where this falls down), but OTOH, you get a little more control over how the semantics of your application are encoded. YMMV.