[m0llusk]

It is quick and easy to access and work with the DOM using jQuery. Both React and Angular are heavyweight libraries that require a lot of bondage and discipline to work as intended. React is from and linked to Facebook and Angular is from and linked to Google. Both of these social media ad companies are broadly considered to be corrupt and potentially best broken up by force of law. There is not particular corporate agenda or threat of breakup hanging over jQuery.

This idea of software tools being on the way out is a slippery one. Perl and PHP are both broadly considered to be somewhere between slipping and no longer relevant, yet a close look shows there are still many commercial sites and actively developed frameworks built using those tools. Popularity and recent trends alone are not necessarily a robust guide to utility or futures.

[ncallaway]

> It is quick and easy to access and work with the DOM using jQuery

I think the actual medium-term risk to jQuery is not the heavyweight alternatives that you identified. It's that browsers are much better and providing standard and consistent API support for many necessary DOM interactions.

When I need a lightweight solution, I find myself using MDN documentation more often than jQuery documentation. For me, jQuery was much more about providing a single API that was usable across a wide array of browsers. That's less necessary today than it was a decade ago.

All that being said, I don't think jQuery will die out anytime soon. It still has a niche that it can usefully fill for a long time, and still has a ton of existing dependencies that rely on it.

[chrisco255]

Both angular and react are MIT licensed libraries that could be forked at any time by any one. Furthermore these useful frameworks have nothing to do with the business model of Google and Facebook.

jQuery is not suitable for large application development. It can be useful here and there but not as a foundational layer for an application architecture.