[mistercow]

>TBH with an attitude like that, you're keeping yourself dependent on jQuery and therefore preventing yourself from progressing as a professional software engineer.

Using a tool because you recognize that it is more reliable than not using the tool is not the same as being dependent on the tool. I've worked on projects well-suited to jQuery where the client didn't want any jQuery dependencies, and I made it cross browser compatible. But it took longer to write that code, and will take longer to maintain in the future, than if I had just used jQuery.