Comment by senfiaj

jQuery was very useful when many features were missing or not consistent/standardized between browsers. Nowadays, JS / DOM API is very rich, mature and standardized. So, jQuery is not as necessary as it was before.

https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

Yes, sometimes the vanilla JS analogs are not the most elegant, but the vast majority are not terribly complicated either.

IMHO, another advantage of vanilla JS (aside from saving ~30KB) is potentially easier debugging. For example, I could find / debug the event listeners using the dev tools more easily when they were implemented via vanilla JS, since for complicated event listeners I had to step through a lot of jQuery code.