&gt;&gt;Honest question: what kinds of things are you doing with React&#x2F;Angular that you can&#x27;t do with jQuery? [...] Is it really higher productivity, or is it just keeping up with the latest fashion?<p>Answer to the first question: nothing. Everything you develop using React&#x2F;Angular&#x2F;etc. can be written using vanilla HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;JS.<p>The difference is that, as your pages become more and more interactive, it becomes harder and harder to deal with the complexity. I recently developed a web form that has a little over 1,000 lines of JQuery. After a while, it became really difficult to keep track of various event handlers, when they would fire and how to make sure they didn&#x27;t interfere with each other. If I were using a framework like React, it would have been much easier. Here&#x27;s a diagram that outlines this concept: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;dSQTLDE" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;dSQTLDE</a><p>&gt;&gt;I feel like the vast majority of websites don&#x27;t need more than a little JavaScript<p>Web<i>sites</i> don&#x27;t. Web <i>apps</i> do. The distinction becomes bigger and more important every day.