>While this is true, I can still code circles around frontend developers using vanilla JS. My first use of jQuery was in the dark days was building UIs (with t

>While this is true, I can still code circles around frontend developers using vanilla JS. My first use of jQuery was in the dark days was building UIs (with things like drag and drop, etc) that had to run on Internet Explorer and Netscape. We'd started with "vanilla" but were ending up with what was effectively two separate codebases. Moving over to jQuery let us eliminate a massive amount of duplicate code and dramatically increased our productivity.