I guess you never worked on a complicated web app that was 100% jQuery, because web frameworks were not a thing yet.

I was a JavaScript developer for about 15 years and I moved onto something else because most of the people doing the work can't program. Not at all. I got tired of being held hostage by people who couldn't function without more help than they needed.

I also get tired of the arguments from ignorance. The you don't know how hard life is type of bullshit arguments. I do know because I have done this work, probably much longer than you, and its not as challenging as you are claiming.

What if I told you that you didn't need jQuery either.

Using the DOM APIs directly? Please do that. Have fun!

I do it and its just not significant. You should try it before evoking a holy war against it.

I did, around 15 years ago. It was honestly not that bad.

How many people did you have on your team? What was employee turn over on the project? How long was the development?

Second that.

Add to it dev churn each 6 months one dev leaves an new joins full of fresh new ideas how to jquery. In the meantime also 2 freelancers adding their stuff.