Seems to just be just shorthand for querySelector / querySelectorAll for those that like the jQuery style syntax. And then the ability to use forEach and map on NodeList elements.
It's a neat little snippet for those that want that, but other than that, makes really no difference.
Yep, it's just shorthand. It's something I've been using in some projects recently as an alternative to something like jQuery, so I thought it would be useful in some sense to share it!
I guess this is just stemming from my view that a huge library like jQuery isn't necessarily needed anymore, now that most browsers support things like a good native API for DOM manipulation and traversal.
There's a point to using this: it's a nice little convenience that a lot of people like about jQuery's style that requires no dependencies, can be copied & pasted without introducing a blob of possibly fragile code, and should have basically zero impact on performance. Try thinking of it as an idiom instead of a library. If you honestly think that all syntax that can be described as shorthand has no point you're missing a lot of expressiveness. That attitude tends to lead to littering code with the kind of laboriously spelled out replacements for the standard library that someone new to a language is prone to.
Is your background mainly Java or perhaps K&R-era C? I can understand how coming from that you might not be used to the little convenient tweaks you can make to a more dynamic language.
It's a neat little snippet for those that want that, but other than that, makes really no difference.