I know that feeling. When I was first learning React, I didn't understand why React developers hated seeing jQuery in React projects. But after getting more into the framework, I've realized that using jQuery isn't necessary because React has ref's and event handlers such as onClick built in to many components, so accessing DOM elements and adding event listeners can be easily done. Also, because React uses a virtual DOM, I believe it's not great for performance to directly manipulate the DOM as is the case in jQuery.