One aspect of this is how you think about UI. The underlying pattern of jQuery is fully side-effects -- you select an element and make some changes to it. Frameworks like React and Vue.js allows to create UI components whose states are completely determined by data, i.e. what the UI looks like is the value of a pure function, mathematically speaking. It also updates the UI with minimum DOM changes when the data changes. (Although you don't have to make them pure, and arguably you can achieve the same thing with jQuery.) Depending on where you are, it makes UI widgets much more readable and maintainable. These frameworks are innovative in terms of state management compared to "old approaches" (of course, with additional benefits like reusability etc)

Bear in mind that today's websites and web based desktop applications are much, much more complicated than two decades ago, and has a much higher requirement for scalability and maintainability. If you just want to create simple UI, indeed they may not be your best choice.