[globular-toast]

I'm not saying jQuery isn't great, but being entrenched and being great are two different things. It's not really saying anything to say things would break if you remove it.

The thing is for a certain time, jQuery was almost seen as inseparable from JS itself. Like the Python standard library is to Python. You can still find StackOverflow questions today asking to do something in JS and the answer is jQuery, and not just "here's how to do it in jQuery", just "here's what you asked for". That means it certainly got used in a lot of places where it wasn't really necessary.

The backlash against it, though, is just your typical pendulum swing that seems so much an unfortunate part of human nature. It's like when CSS was in and table-based layouts were out. I saw developers trying to use CSS to render tables. Nuance is hard and people can't help going to extremes. jQuery is probably still a really useful tool. I've seen some jQuery expressions that are far more elegant and beautiful then a plain JS equivalent. Whether this matters for any particular project is completely up to you. I don't like the way it encourages tons of ad hoc JS snippets all over the place, but that's a fault of developers, not jQuery.