Honestly, I made the jump from vanilla HTML/CSS to straight up React in the past year. I didn't even do much jQuery/JS. Professionally, I was just doing design in it's purest sense I guess. So I didn't go through the evolution of frameworks over the years.
That said, I like:
Components. Especially coupled with Atomic Design
Easy learning curve
React + React native is very enticing. Learn once, write multiple times. It almost feels like getting 3 for the price of one. Over the years, I tried learning Android and iOS dev, but I never got my head around it.