Websites were much more varied and creative in the jQuery era, and even more so in the Flash era that came before. Different interaction paradigms, wild animations, full-screen effects, etc etc. Not necessarily "better", but React didn't really enable anything we couldn't have before - even today when real performance is required you will resort to canvas/webgl, alternative rendering approaches and skipping react's render cycle.

React was never [1] fast [2] - that is one of the biggest misconceptions in frontend development in the last decade.

[2] https://css-tricks.com/radeventlistener-a-tale-of-client-sid...

[1] https://www.zachleat.com/web/react-criticism/

I wrote websites in the jquery era. I wrote web apps back then. Gaming tools, databases, tons of dynamic stuff.

When I used react for the first time I cried with “where has this been all my life? It would have saved me years of work”.

Whenever I see claims like yours I always have hardcore doubts. React may not have “enabled” new things just like ai coding doesn’t “enable” new things … as long as you consider time to be in infinite supply. If you care about getting shit done, there is no comparison.