A lot of people throw shade on jQuery, but it’s extremely powerful and versatile. I’ve built entire apps with just jQuery, Foundation, and POJO classes (and oth

A lot of people throw shade on jQuery, but it’s extremely powerful and versatile. I’ve built entire apps with just jQuery, Foundation, and POJO classes (and other smaller libraries as needed sprinkled in). This stack is certainly not appropriate for all apps, but for small projects it’s far easier to manage than the overkill that is React or Angular. Sure, you don’t get generators and built-in spec testing or other Enterprise-friendly goodies, but for simple apps that use a REST API, jQuery sure as hell provides a nice set of tools. And while modern browsers support the query selector methods that sort mimic jQuery, this starts to get awfully tedious if you want to do complex DOM manipulation and you’ll find yourself writing functions that start to look a lot like jQuery. Why reinvent the wheel in order to save a few kb of space and pride yourself on having a “100% jQuery-free app!” when modern apps already load much larger libraries or minify and package the entire app’s code?