I started Web programming just as jQuery was coming onto the scene, and it was truly a godsend. Browsers can't agree on how to do simple things? jQuery! XMLHTTPRequest is ridiculously hard to remember? jQuery! Want to distribute standalone, reusable UI components? jQuery UI!

But then, after years of jQuery goodness, I dropped it. What happened? Well, my workplace dropped support for older browsers (< IE 10), and all of a sudden, I could accomplish everything without worrying about the overhead that comes with every additional dependency.

I admit, I'm a performance nut. People have accused me of being too obsessed with web performance, which I think is ridiculous. But, the fact is, I can now get everything I liked about jQuery for free from the browser:

Element.querySelector instead of $()
fetch() instead of $.ajax()
Element.classList.add()/remove()/toggle()
Web Components (WIP) instead of jQuery UI (plus a multitude of newer, simpler component models, like React or Vue)

I will forever be grateful for what jQuery gave us, and for the badly-needed push it gave browsers to get better. There's a reason why we have a lot of nice things in browsers today, and that's jQuery. However, all things must end, and, unless you have to support very old browsers, I personally don't see the need to use it anymore. Yeah, the browser versions of the APIs may be weird, but they're also free. No extra script to load, implementations in browserspace/C++ instead of JS, etc.

For someone as obsessed as I am with every byte transmitted and every millisecond spent parsing JS, browsers implementing things that used to be in JS are a new godsend.