I think a lot of people conflate "horrible state of web dev anno 2008" with "jQuery". At the time I heard coworkers talk about things like "oh, just make the va

I think a lot of people conflate "horrible state of web dev anno 2008" with "jQuery". At the time I heard coworkers talk about things like "oh, just make the variable public"; I had never heard of "public variables" in JS context before, but it wasn't my project and at the time I didn't know much about JS so I just assumed there was a gap in my knowledge. When I later took over the project I discovered that "public variable" meant "put window. in front of it". I'm not saying jQuery or vanilla JS (which is the same thing, just a different API) is the end-all of everything, but with a bit of care and organisation it's not too hard to make dynamic "modern" sites and even web apps that are fast and can be maintained fairly easily. It is easy to make a mess of things though, as it doesn't guide you through a "framework" and especially in larger teams with different experience/skill levels this can be an issue. At the end of the day I think this is a "Python vs. Ruby" type of discussion, where both can obviously work well, but both obviously also have their own strengths and weaknesses. I dislike a certain section of the frontend crowd who thinks that going full-in on WebPack+React+TypeScript+1561 dependencies is the only possible way to build something useful and derides anyone who disagrees (at some point someone called me "the anti-vaxxer of frontend development" over this).