Comment by temporallobe

I do a lot of custom JS widget development, games, and utilities that are outside the context of a gigantic framework like React. Not everything is a a full-page SPA. Vanilla JS is indeed better than it was, but I found myself writing small JQ-like libraries and utilities to do tedious or even basic DOM manipulation, so I switched back to JQ and saved myself a lot of time and headaches. Compressed, minified JQ is also pretty small and is negligible in space consumption.

JQ is also used in frameworks like Bootstrap (although I think they’re trying to drop third-party dependencies like this since they tend to cause conflicts).

I have also used JQ in an Angular app where complex on-the-fly DOM manipulation just isn’t practical with standard tooling.