[lettergram]

Indeed! In fact, after I spent time using react and angular for two separate products, I actually switched back to mostly rolling my own JQuery (usually).

It just works, and takes up much less of my mindshare than trying to learn various frameworks every time I roll a new site (which incidentally is every 3 - 6 months). There is always more support for it (with all the questions being answered), and the API never changes. I actually develop faster, although typically I’m using web frameworks with templating backends - such as Rails (Ruby), Django (Python), Flask (Python), and Revel (Go)

[jamra]

I did that on a product as well. It went pretty well. The issue is with more complicated UI. The more complicated it is, the faster JQuery breaks down. That being said, it's better to have a bit of a spaghetti JQuery than to try and retrain unwilling programmers in Angular.

[mythrwy]

jQuery doesn't have to be spaghetti though. It gets that rap I think because most people that used it weren't good/experienced enough to organize bigger code. It can/usually does turn into a mess though but is faster to bang small things out in for me anyway.

[jamra]

It doesn’t have to be spaghetti. You are right. However, when you change state in multiple places, they either have to be aware of each other or you need some kind of state management. The benefit of libraries like React are that they abstract view rendering and take care of DOM diffing. The benefit of frameworks like Angular is that it manages state in addition to what React does.

On simpler projects, JQuery is more productive. But my main point is to program where it is comfortable and practical. The better academic choice is not necessarily the better choice. View your programming resources as people and make the pragmatic choice.