Many of the things that jQuery made easy back in the day are now pretty easy with pure js (Ajax calls, improved selectors, programmatic DOM manipulation, etc), and browser support for most JS features is way more standardized.
Granted, your pure JS is likely to be way more verbose to write, making it look more intimidating than jQuery.
That being said. jQuery is performant in modern browsers, and when being delivered compressed and minified is tiny, so if you want to use it, go for it. Anybody who criticizes you or tells you “you should use [x]” for your online store or website is a JS elitist.
jQuery is really only a “bad” choice for big interactive web apps, where frameworks that handle state and routing independently of the DOM are a much better choice.
jQuery is performant in modern browsers, and when being delivered compressed and minified is tiny, so if you want to use it, go for it. Anybody who criticizes you or tells you “you should use [x]” for your online store or website is a JS elitist.
I was huge into jQuery but the “modern” frameworks seem like a complete dumpster fire full of poo to me.
All of this MVCC non-sense, and components and services and bundlers and shit, megabytes of libraries and tons of time spent in the build process, security vulnerabilities in libraries like “hash-dash-framework.js” in the dependency chain, a final output that requires gigabit speed to load in a reasonable timeframe, and still I see the pages developed with Angular making 4 or 5 calls for the same fucking bit of information from the backend.
In many ways you’re correct, the “modern” js toolkit can be a nightmare. I work for a SaaS company that makes emergency management software. I’m pretty proud of our setup. It’s Vue 3, it’s incredibly optimized. We have tree shaking and code splitting, e.g. there’s hundreds of potential JS files you might load using our software, but they will only load when you need them, over a brotli compressed HTTP/2 connection so it really is efficient.
With the amount of data we process through our API and how it’s presented to the client it would be a nightmare to not have Vue for state management and routing, axios for API calls, etc. But many SaaS products certainly aren’t optimized like ours
