I've done frontend development with a variety of frameworks and libraries. There are things I like about angular and react, though I find them both fragile and slow to develop and maintain because so much of what they're doing is opaque. I often find I'm spending forever fiddling with angular filters, or with unexpected react lifecycle properties' states, or with fiddly churning React/Redux syntax.

In contrast, I find developing with jQuery to be a pleasure because there's never much of a mystery about what's going on or what I need to add next. I recently was wondering if I should try to dive deeper into jQuery to see if I can use it as a light front-end framework for some of the purposes I've been using react and angular.

The TodoMVC example of written in jQuery is impressive: it's an SPA that includes routing and everything. And it would obviously be easy to add on Ajax to use an external API.

What I'm wondering is, if I tried to develop a more robust and complex application in jQuery instead of angular or react, where would I be most likely to miss them? Would it be in the reuseability of components in different views? In the built-in control over components' life cycles? In the cumbersomeness of having to code every state delta instead of just counting on the DOM engine to update things correctly?