jQuery is the definition of reinventing the wheel. And it's a decidedly worse wheel. A heavier, uglier, wheel, with at, best a slight advantage in expediency when trying to slap together a low quality rush job.
That anyone was seriously arguing for its use on serious projects in 2018 is pretty hard to believe. It made sense to use when browser compatibility was a complicated matter. That was jQuery's singular justification for existence, many years ago, but that time has long since passed. 90% of browsers are auto-updating and standards compliant, i.e. Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. There are very, very few incompatibilities. The other 5-10% of the market is IE11. IE11 isn't too bad and is easy to support.
In this era, there is nothing "easier" about using jQuery, unless you dislike programming so much that writing a couple extra lines of code is worth dragging around a few thousand lines of dead weight and being forced to write ugly syntax. And frankly I have yet to see an example of jQuery code that couldn't be written in plain js and refactored down to fewer lines, if the coder has any semblance of taste.
jQuery is the definition of reinventing the wheel. And it's a decidedly worse wheel. A heavier, uglier, wheel, with at, best a slight advantage in expediency when trying to slap together a low quality rush job.
That anyone was seriously arguing for its use on serious projects in 2018 is pretty hard to believe. It made sense to use when browser compatibility was a complicated matter. That was jQuery's singular justification for existence, many years ago, but that time has long since passed. 90% of browsers are auto-updating and standards compliant, i.e. Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. There are very, very few incompatibilities. The other 5-10% of the market is IE11. IE11 isn't too bad and is easy to support.
In this era, there is nothing "easier" about using jQuery, unless you dislike programming so much that writing a couple extra lines of code is worth dragging around a few thousand lines of dead weight and being forced to write ugly syntax. And frankly I have yet to see an example of jQuery code that couldn't be written in plain js and refactored down to fewer lines, if the coder has any semblance of taste.
"[...]it made sense to use when browser compatibility was a complicated matter."
You think compatibility is not a problem anymore but it still is : caniuse.com/#statuses=rec,pr,cr,wd...