[kbenson]

> These days you need jquery less because browsers are more standards compliant and css animations basically work.

Originally, jQuery's big selling point wasn't that it handled animations, it was that it gave you a query selector, and one that could be used in any browser. jQuery predates the release of chrome, and came out a few years before document.querySelector was added to Firefox and Chrome was released.

jQuery was monumentally more useful for common actions compared to its contemporaries, such as Dojo, MooTools and Prototype.