FWIW, I'm not a front-end developer. I've had to do some over the years, but it's certainly not my area of expertise (I work in AppSec), so my opinion is worth

FWIW, I'm not a front-end developer. I've had to do some over the years, but it's certainly not my area of expertise (I work in AppSec), so my opinion is worth very little. jQuery might be a crutch, sure, but I'm not sure crutches are a bad thing. There's no reason to make something harder than it has to be. I just like how some things take far fewer key stroke and are less verbose, but still readable. Readability is subjective. There are people that think Perl is fine and I think it ranks as one of the least readable languages to ever reach popular status. Meanwhile, I think Python is the most readable language to have ever been created, and somehow some people struggle with it, and tbh it kind of blows my mind.