Any Modern Alternative to JQuery?

You don't need jQuery. Every problem jQuery solved has been standardized into native javascript so you can just use Javascript to build web apps.

For example instead of $(".button"), you can do document.querySelector(".button"), and so on.

That said, if you must use a framework and looking for something less complicated than react, look into Vue or Svelte.

Vanilla JavaScript is what you need today. You can use document.querySelector, Array.prototype.map, fetch, and all browsers have the same behaviour so no need for any library like jQuery anymore.

Check out the MDN web docs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript

Bottom line: Use javascript without a library.

Unless there is code which explicitly needs jQuery, most bindings/helpers are available here: http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

Since you're building such a website, a common option for you may be to use a lightweight framework like Svelte/Sapper as your client. I've been using this for most projects with a Django backend.

Jquery is great for manipulation, and https://stimulus.hotwire.dev/ is a great way of structuring javascript and helps prevent spaghetti of Jquery & JS.

The main thing that makes me use jQuery is its syntax, saves me a lot of time writing equivalent vanilla js code. The templating is handled by Django so there's little interest in React or Vue.

Imho you just need to get rid of Redux, it's unnecessary complexity for most React apps where hooks + props are already enough to do most of the work.

Also, TailwindCSS is complementary imo.

I think one pro React has is its performance advantage over jquery and handled edge cases. There are some others like Vue or Svelte which could be more performant on other cases but I have bias on React because of its ecosystem, e.g. if I want cute icons I know FontAwesome has its own dedicated react component. Cute charts? Airbnb has visx charting components.

A “modern looking” web site doesn’t really need any JavaScript framework or library. What are you looking for that vanilla JavaScript cannot provide?

There are, of course, alternatives to React. Angular, Svelte, and Vue are among the most popular. There are even light weight versions such as Alpine. But it’s hard to make any recommendations without understanding your requirements.

I want to try this soon:

https://htmx.org/

htmx allows you to access AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets and Server Sent Events directly in HTML, using attributes, so you can build modern user interfaces with the simplicity and power of hypertext

htmx is small (~9k min.gz'd), dependency-free, extendable & IE11 compatible

If you are not looking forward to mastering a new front end framework, maybe you could try django-unicorn: https://github.com/adamghill/django-unicorn

I haven’t tested it but it looks interesting and might be going in the direction you are looking for.

I’m against using jQuery as much as the next guy in 2020, but I had to use it recently because I needed JSONP and couldn’t find an easy way to do this without JQ. Did I miss something? (CORS not an option)

Have you thought about using plain typescript? It's a huge win to code organisation.

You can create a react site in a couple minutes using create-react-app. React has JSX which allows you to do basically everything JQuery could without hacks.

Fetch or one of the wrapper libraries has HTTP covered.

Typescript is great if you want everything to work seamlessly on older browsers while using modern JS.

Yeah it's a lot to learn but once you know it, it's just as efficient as the old "JQuery forests + HTML" and way more maintainable.

I did ASP.NET MVC for years and once I learned React + Angular I never looked back. They work just like the desktop UI libraries of old, which is a good thing.

Django and related "server side" frameworks are functionally obsolete unless you have a very static website that needs perfect SEO (ex blog, news site)