The jQuery spaghetti of the past seems worse than the React spaghetti of today. Too many unpredictable side effects. Changing one thing breaks something else. On business-scale timeframes, you can't clean it up.

React enjoyed its spot in the limelight. Then, unskilled people wrote bad React and the framework, not rank-and-file developers, took the credibility hit. It is more difficult, I suppose, to make a user-perceived slow webpage in jQuery.