[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.