Think of it this way: what if someone new to jQuery (although jQuery is almost like a household name to us, there are a lot of people new to web development) wa

Think of it this way: what if someone new to jQuery (although jQuery is almost like a household name to us, there are a lot of people new to web development) wanted some plugins? They would look at the page on the jQuery web site, and they would see spam. This is bad for new users, and especially bad for the jQuery community as a whole if they wind up using buggy or outdated plugins. By contrast, an experienced person who's already been using jQuery is probably just going to go on Github or do their own searching. There's no tangible benefit to keeping it around. The question you really have to ask: how useful is the plugin page? From my experience, it's pretty useless. A newbie will find most of the widgets they need (with high-quality code) in the jQuery UI/Mobile projects, and there are tons of authoritative blog posts if they do a little bit of searching.