Ha, JQuery. I just had to look at a legacy JQuery code base...and I shudder the thought of ever going back to that paradigm. Sometimes new patterns/frameworks/architectures do really change the game for good.
I still use jQuery regularly. It works well and doesn't get in the way. I'd rather work on a jQuery codebase written by a good engineer than a React codebase written by an average engineer, and there's no amount you could pay me to work on a Javascript codebase written by a bad engineer.
The problem you've identified is that most code, in general, is terrible. The code written by people who chase trends tends to be worse than average.
You literally can't write spaghetti code in React due to one-way data flow. That's what prevents the spaghetti. UI is a function of state and props. JQuery is an imperative DOM altering library that isn't even necessary with modern browsers.
> The code written by people who chase trends tends to be worse than average.
This. Instead of learning a handfull of technologies well they learn a lot of technologies very poorly. If I am hiring I now look at it as a red flag when people have too many frameworks listed.
I have an angular codebase to maintain, on Angular 1.3 - probably when it was peak of the hype cycle. Its a spaghetti mess. Using a different framwork doesn't make you immune to these problems. Especially when people don't seem to understand the new tech especially well.
