I have, many times in the last 2 or 3 years... I still do... It's cheap and easy to implement, it's easy to use and it ads just as much cruft as I'm willing to tolerate. I build boring software, average CRUD applications for government departments, people in this line of work don't give a shit about millisecond delays or reactivity, hell, they don't even care about responsiveness... jQuery facilitates high speed development, provides neat functionality that doesn't get in the way, it's easy to maintain, and keeps people happy.
Even if you did give a shit about those things, all that can be achieved with jQuery. IMO the real downside of jQuery is not being as opinionated as other mentioned "technologies", which leaves too much room for thinking
That said, back in the day it provided functionality that JS just didn't, or was quite cumbersome.
With recent JS versions, JS can do a lot of what JQ did for it, but JQ's API or "surface area" is still syntactically smaller and (IMO) more sane than those JS improvements.
I dunno, but it is included in many commercial libraries (free ones tend to be less reliant on large dependencies); a lot of people know it and a lot of people don't even know how to start bundling a node (or dino? what are people using now?) project; and it has a lot of extensions that really impress some people.
Besides it having a way more convenient API than bare JS. (That honestly, I only don't use because bare JS is conveniently documented by MDN, otherwise I think I'd be fully on it too.)
~43% of the internet runs on WordPress[1] while ~75% of the internet uses jQuery[2], so even if you took out every website that used jQuery due to being built on WordPress, the number of websites using jQuery would be over six times higher than the number of sites built using react.
"I know it well" is really the only motivation you need. Why learn a new tool when you have used this one a hundred times before and know it'll get the job done?
If you are brand new to the space and looking to learn, then yeah stay away from jquery.
Start? Not really. However that doesn't mean there isn't active development and new features happening on projects that are already using jQuery, and so the expectations from that library matter.
If you haven't started your dev journey with React or some other framework like it, you actually know for a fact that they are not necessary an probably an overkill for a lot of web apps. Websites were built with interactivity, were lighter and worked better, before the dawn of slop-assisted SPAs and developers who don't even know how the browser and hypermedia actually works.
