It's hard to make client-side webapps, using a procedural programming paradigm just makes it harder than it needs to be, but using jQuery for anything else is exactly why it got popular.
What’s not that hard is managing a bit of state and writing sensible CSS to make it reusable.
as the apps get big, state becomes a mess, fully reusing code is very hard, making anything even slightly reactive becomes not only a lot of code, but a jumbled mess of mutability, usually copy pasted from somewhere else. I will take any other type of app over that - I don't care if it's angular, vue, react, next, whatever.
So i contend that not only is "managing a bit of state and writing sensible CSS to make it reusable" very hard, I haven't even seen it done ever, at least in my personal experience of the code I touched
At a much much smaller scale however, jQuery and CSS or in many cases just HTML and CSS will do just fine. Knowing which approach to take is the mark of someone with some level of experience above junior.
Instead they burn an insane amount of energy (and unfathomable bandwidth) inventing, learning and debugging crazy abstractions and build systems (that change every year or so) on top of the native platform that is the web.
It really feels like a collective bad trip that I hope the industry wakes up from, eventually. But after more than a decade of this insanity, I’m not holding my breath.
Sometimes you choose hypothetically difficult debugging if it eliminates the need to deal with the mechanics of the lowest level of interacting with a system. If you haven't needed to do that, then you'd be inclined to think it's an unlikely situation to be in.