Agreed. Furthermore, a lot of those tasks were downright unnecessarily painful and tedious time sinks, e.g. browser agnostic control when the ecosystem was much

Agreed. Furthermore, a lot of those tasks were downright unnecessarily painful and tedious time sinks, e.g. browser agnostic control when the ecosystem was much more fragmented and HTML5 more nascent. Also, jQuery's documentation was solid, and it was very easily extensible.