If you've been a web dev for 10 years then you'll know that the most fundamental tool for scripting is a pain point (document ready), jQuery did a good job of abstracting the nuances away, see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/799981/document-ready-equ...
And the incompatible ajax interfaces. And the inconsistent element selection. And the...
I'm also not sure I'd call document ready the most fundamental as a lot of people (including me) used to use onclick='' and onload='' directly on elements back then when we all loaded script tags in the head.
Document ready is hardly the most fundamental “tool” for scripting, and it has always been easy to resolve in a cross-browser way: stick your scripts before </body>.
I would say no. It's everywhere. Even as you mention it's a common dependency or comes bundled with a lot of stuff. I have not sat down and written logic that "does the same thing in more than one browser" in a very long time but I'd venture to guess the part of jquery that is browser javascript api abstraction is still very relevant today.
To me it always felt kinda strange seeing all these jQuery Stackoverflow questions and answers.
When I switched from server side rendering to SPAs, I had the impression everyone was already hating on jQuery and avoided it. I read "Pro JavaScript Techniques" and "JavaScript the good Parts" and started my JS career :)
ExtJS 4 came out and I did my first SPA with it.
Later I did some university projects with Ember, which seems to use jQuery, but I never had to call one of its functions directly.
After that I started freelancing and ended up in a React project, which I found kinda nice to work with.
I started with Prototype. Not sure if it came out before or after the first jQuery, but it was the cool kid for a while. Then the world realized it was a disaster and started moving to jQuery...
Too bad Magento devs missed that newsflash. Nowadays it still bundles Prototype.js, and every theme and 50% third-party modules you install carry their own copies of jQuery, all at different versions, placed in random locations, and embedded into the page differently.
Ah, ok, so you're not a 10 year JavaScript developer, that's very different thing. If you were doing DOM manip 10 years ago without jQuery / MooTools / Dojo / YUI you would be someone that loves pain.
I started with learning vanilla JS and doing my professional stuff with ExtJS.
But as you say, jQuery wasn't a requirement. I knew a few people who hated it with passion back then, they were all using MooTools. That's probably why I avoided it...
What was your experience with Ext? I had to use it for a few years, and was never a huge fan. We ran into a lot of obscure bugs in their code which resulted in a number of hackaround "Ext.Overrides," and their support forums (Mitch Simmeons in particular) is a joke.
I started on 3(.5?) and helped with a migration to 4 (which was a disgusting mistake of a process on our end). I like the format of their docs -- JSDuck was my favorite docset for a quite a while. I also enjoyed their methodology for constructing views and view hierarchies. Ultimately, I'd say I was a fan of what they were doing, I just think the implementation was rather shoddy, and the docs were frequently wrong or outdated, and (as mentioned) support was not good. When I got to React, it actually did bring back some memories of Ext, but without the full MVC hierarchy around views.