But... but... jQuery? :D
Anyways, in real-world development, jQuery is still the #1 go-to tool. A little above vanilla, but not too much abstraction. It's just right.
By the way, there's
- fetch to replace that old XHR. (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API)
- Promises which should come with fetch, and also replace success and error callbacks in jQuery (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...)
- document fragments to create DOM elements and do manipulation in memory. (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/DocumentFra...)