jQuery is not very useful these days though. It just provides imperative functions for doing stuff — manipulating DOM elements, making HTTP requests and so on —

jQuery is not very useful these days though. It just provides imperative functions for doing stuff — manipulating DOM elements, making HTTP requests and so on — and they're no longer necessary since pretty much everything is built-in now (querySelector, classList, Promises, fetch, Web Animations…) And what jQuery does not do is the one important thing — declarative data binding. By the way, another built-in thing in browsers is Web Components — having a component model is also necessary for modern app development. So if you take Web Components and add data binding and some other sugar, you get Polymer. Here's a good overview of each layer of sugar it adds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=assSM3rlvZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=assSM3rlvZ8 I also don't like React and Angular — but I absolutely enjoy working with Polymer.