I do remember jQuery 1.0. And I do remember what was before it. That time is now called Browser Dark Ages - for good reasons. Your description of "magic band-a

I do remember jQuery 1.0. And I do remember what was before it. That time is now called Browser Dark Ages - for good reasons. Your description of "magic band-aid at expense of performance" is IMNSHO unfair - before it became a huge golden hammer (and long before small replacements like Zepto), jQuery brought usable, cross-browser scripting, with features that the browsers themselves did not have (We're talking IE6 here, remember?). This allowed robust coding, and it was actually more optimized for common operations than a naïve "pure" JS implementation. This is indeed becoming a problem of the past, precisely because browsers started to implement those features natively - but the choice of features was often driven by "oh, and jQuery does this, it would be nice if we didn't need a library for it".