What exactly is so difficult about DOM manipulation? I honestly don't get why people see it as a problem that warrants zillion badly written frameworks, while other critical language issues are pretty much ignored.
The DOM isn't a language issue, it's an API issue. That issue has gotten much better in recent times, but jQuery became popular because those API issues were so big. Today, you look at caniuse and see that almost every new feature is not implemented or partially implemented by at least one browser.
That's bad when talking about something like the File API, but that used to be the case for DOM primitive operations. Instead of one browser, every browser implemented almost every feature in an incompatible way. For example sizzle (the selector that's the foundation of jQuery) came into existence because there wasn't a unified way to do something as simple as selecting a node from the DOM.
Things like querySelectorAll have made life easier for most of us, but the DOM is still a maze of barely compatible implementations. I don't dislike it to the degree I used to, but I still don't like it.
The DOM isn't a language issue, it's an API issue. That issue has gotten much better in recent times, but jQuery became popular because those API issues were so big. Today, you look at caniuse and see that almost every new feature is not implemented or partially implemented by at least one browser.
That's bad when talking about something like the File API, but that used to be the case for DOM primitive operations. Instead of one browser, every browser implemented almost every feature in an incompatible way. For example sizzle (the selector that's the foundation of jQuery) came into existence because there wasn't a unified way to do something as simple as selecting a node from the DOM.
Things like querySelectorAll have made life easier for most of us, but the DOM is still a maze of barely compatible implementations. I don't dislike it to the degree I used to, but I still don't like it.