I don't think that burying jQuery is the best idea, too. It is a very well-designed library. What we really need is a library of functions to make the native AP

I don't think that burying jQuery is the best idea, too. It is a very well-designed library. What we really need is a library of functions to make the native APIs less awful and verbose - which exists: Zepto.js. Ultimately mutating the DOM directly is just an awful job - it's solving problems that are ancillary to the problem that you are trying to solve (making great UIs). React and Vue feel like sensible abstractions, although there's still a far better but undiscovered solution to this problem.