Unless you are doing things like modifying a Google-style speadsheet of 5000+ columns and rows, you won't see much of a performance loss from using jQuery. It

Unless you are doing things like modifying a Google-style speadsheet of 5000+ columns and rows, you won't see much of a performance loss from using jQuery. It does add a microscopic bit of weight to your page and some milliseconds to your load time, but that's it. It's a ressource that is smaller and faster to load than the content of the page. In my opinion, this argument is meaningless. Modern SPA frameworks are slowing the web way more. Loading your jQuery scripts async will make this transparent for the user. In the edge-cases where jQuery is slower than native JS (because of polyfills, mostly), there's nothing stopping you from using those directly. Unless you are Netflix and micro-optimizing your homepage to the millisecond, there's no hard reason to avoid jQuery. I believe that those slight performance losses are worth the trade for the benefits of using a strong and well tested framework that has browser support and lowers development time. I'd trust non JavaScript experts to use jQuery on my projects, I can't say the same for raw JavaScript. Trend-driven development is a pitfall. Boring technologies are where it's at.