I did that before in Spring 2015. Here are my reasons;
- jQuery is comparably slow, read this from Chrome's Developer addyosmani.com/blog/chrome-devtools-state-of-the-…
- React is powerful enough, jQuery itself is a large library that increased bundle size
- If you want to optimize the performance of a React app, the right way is to reduce virtual DOM rendering and reduce accidentally touching the DOM. React itself is batching DOM operations for you, so using jQuery might cause unexpected forced reflows. DOM APIs itself is more controllable than jQuery.