This isn't exactly true either. Taking the points line by line: Angular has a version of jQuery embedded, and replaces that with the full version if it is inc

This isn't exactly true either. Taking the points line by line: Angular has a version of jQuery embedded, and replaces that with the full version if it is included in the page. AngularUI was not there to reduce dependencies on jQuery (UI, which is different than jQuery Core), but rather to provide the UI patterns in Angular directives so that developers didn't need to write their own over and over. That said, if you are new to Angular, my recommendation is to try not to use jQuery as that will force you to consider the "Angular" way of doing things rather than the "jQuery" way. The guy who wrote You Might Not Need jQuery has also said that he was looking more at framework developers who don't need to make jQuery a dependency, not the average joe building a website. RWaldron, a jQuery contributor, put together a list of quite a few of the bugs that jQuery fixes for browser compatibility. Don't get me wrong, Vanilla JS is great, and I love the site. But there are quite valid reasons for using jQuery and many of them are just as valid now as they were in the past. You can write "good" jQuery, it doesn't have to be "js soup".