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Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

The tech mindset is generally focused on change moving forward. Over time, jQuery was seen as a blocker for a number of areas:

- Browsers and the web becoming less painful to work with out of the box. If we all keep using jQuery, will these issues it fixes ever be addressed?

- Dependencies that hang around for a long time tend to increase technical debt or fear of common dependency-related issues

- A huge part of membership in a community involves signaling. Some of that signalling means syncing with what isn't liked, and speaking against it.

So you can get some people who want to live in a better world, some who want to be less annoyed by clutter they don't need, and others who just want to belong...and they see jQuery as a cheap ticket, especially if they aren't using it.

Still, jQuery is like any tool, best used by those who have a plan for working around the troublesome aspects...

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>> - Browsers and the web becoming less painful to work with out of the box. If we all keep using jQuery, will these issues it fixes ever be addressed?

That's true, but the beauty of jQuery code is still missing in current JavaScript. It would be nice in my opinion if JavaScript would copy something of that shortness and beauty, that jQuery brings with it.

It would be interesting how much jQuery is needed to maintain compatibility over different browsers today, in the past that was the main use case. But nowadays I would use it because the code is a beauty to read and to write. For that beauty you need to load 87,5 KB of additional data, but that's not very much.

Still I get the idea of not needing to use another library. But I never saw that a new version of jQuery broke any code, but that may be my mistake.

In the age of frameworks, not only do browsers support the stuff that jquery invented, but those things are hardly done anymore.

It’s been ages since I last had to look up an element by ID or toggle classes. That stuff just doesn’t exist in the new way of doing things.

More's the pity. Now we just constantly delete whole branches of elements from the DOM and recreate them with react.js instead, which is far less efficient. React.js would probably cause your computer to use measureably more electricity even.

That's not true, actually. React will re-use DOM elements wherever possible, even replacing the contents or individual attributes, or changing the order. But manual DOM operations with jQuery tend to be much more coarse-grained simply because they're so tedious, so what you say is likely completely opposite of the truth.

I really don't think it's that big of a deal compared to other things. JS based animations and scroll effects were the real issue. Now that CSS supports these things with GPU acceleration. React DOM changes are usually pretty insignificant unless something has gone wrong and gets stuck in some kind of loop.

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