It's not so much the pain it brings, so much as the fact that a lot of the original inconsistencies and querying it was invented for are either gone or integrat

It's not so much the pain it brings, so much as the fact that a lot of the original inconsistencies and querying it was invented for are either gone or integrated fully into the native APIs. http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ illustrates this fairly well! After working with more modern JS and the pure browser APIs on larger non-trivial projects I can't say I've ever felt the need to reach for jQuery the way I used to in its heyday. I'd be hesitant to refer to jQuery as a framework, as I don't think it fills the same void as what we commonly think of as a "javascript framework" does; it was more a utility for querying and mutating the DOM. It doesn't provide answers for questions like "how do I handle state?" or "how do I convert state into DOM?", although it does give you some tools to answer those questions yourself.