jQuery is nice for small widgets (if you don't mind loading another library), but as soon as you start to make truly reactive content, it falls on its face. A reactive framework like Vue essentially makes your javascript variables control what is rendered implicitly based on their value, instead of explicitly calling a function.

Since the ViewModel binds the variables to the controls, hundreds of lines of jQuery required to update controls literally vanishes. It blew my mind once I understood what reactivity meant in real life. I rewrote a fairly large site in Vue and the JS LOC shrank by nearly two orders of magnitude (of course, a lot of that was due to the previous webdevs problems).

Now that I'm used to Vue, I view jQuery more like a skin disease, some kind of rash that makes everything ugly and swollen.