What's wrong with jQuery? It might be old and busted, but people have been testing and debugging it for years. As JS frameworks go, I've found that it's the best of a bad lot since you can use what you need with existing markup and CSS instead of having to rebuild to accommodate the framework.
Vue
Not sure if it fits your use-case, but if you just want to just throw a couple of react classes on your page, without having to go through all the hassle of setting up a react app (without NPM or WebPack), you could just live transpile react using babel-standalone.
https://babeljs.io/docs/en/babel-standalone
Apparently sites like JSFiddle use babel standalone for live compilation.
Here is a GitHub Gist example: https://gist.github.com/OceanAirdrop/52b2042da21ef52ac5ead0e...
Just remember to wrap your script tags with the "text/babel" type