A lot of what jQuery used to provide is now baked into browsers, so for the most part jQuery is redundant nowadays. You'd still see it show up probably because

A lot of what jQuery used to provide is now baked into browsers, so for the most part jQuery is redundant nowadays. You'd still see it show up probably because the cost of removing jQuery from older systems usually isn't worth the hassle. I would question the notion that jQuery was considered a failure back in the day. jQuery was practically necessary if you didn't want to deal with cross-browser issues.