It seems like their manifesto here hasn't really stood the test of time: https://muut.com/blog/technology/riotjs-the-1kb-mvp-framewor...

(The bits about jQuery at least, anyway.)

True. Things have changed since then. Especially about role of jQuery in views. Riot 2.0 unifies HTML/JS together causing less need for it.

I still think jQuery is still fantastic and definitely has a lot of use cases.

We certainly thought about rebranding. But since Riot 2.0 continues the minimalistic approach and "only" changes the way how views are assebled we thought the name can stay.