[hamhamed]

You do really need it, at least for me. I'd rather write $ sign calls instead of getElementByID or querySelector just to start with. The sizzle library in jQuery is so advanced, that you can't do complex queries on the dom yet with today's browser.

[brandoncordell]

There are small libraries that help with making native DOM operations more jQuery-like. We opted just to write our own since we didn't need a good portion or even the smaller libraries.

[leshow]

the industry is moving away from direct DOM mutation and towards v-dom, so this isn't an issue for a lot of devs.