Every time I use jQuery after helping my friends battle Reactive monsters, I am so eternally grateful that I have such a productive and satisfying tool at my disposal. It requires zero bike-shedding and almost every imaginable edge-case is solved before I start. If it ends up sucking, it's because I made it suck.

Just to abuse metaphors, I believe that jQuery is a "bicycle for the mind" in the true Steve Jobs sense. If you don't love it, please knock yourself out or try an edgier SPA. Spend all of your free time learning how Hooks just made everything you were excited about obsolete.

The pool is warm and the weather is lovely, friends.

I think it's not really needed in today's browser landscape unless you're working on a team that uses it.

I prefer fetch, document.querySelectorAll, and animate.css for 90% of what you would need with jQuery.

While I respect that this comment is an expression of your lived experience (after all, I used the word believe so this is fair game) I am compelled to point out that when you say "of what you would need with jQuery", what you really mean is "what I would need with jQuery".

You know how there's ~3 kinds of Excel users? You have your formatted rows and columns types, people like me that can use SUM(), call APIs and know what pivot tables are... and then there are those ninjas that can implement ray-traced dungeon renderers in a cell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCeOEQVUWZ0

I'm not exactly claiming Carmack-level jQuery proficiency, but comments like yours make me wonder (optimistically) whether you've forgotten all of the amazingly useful things that jQuery can do. Ajax, selectors and CSS transitions are the Nickelback of creative possibility.

As a final note, I am excited that things which once required jQuery are now being solved by the browser and the evolving EcmaScript standard. Ideally, jQuery continues to get smaller and smaller. However, it's intellectually dishonest to claim that all of the non-jQuery techniques are as ergonomic to implement as jQuery idioms. Proof:

http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

I do really like fetch and async/await in general, and working in React has taught me lots of cool tricks to bring back to my real projects. I think everyone should try to build something real with React, just to understand how lucky they are to have the option not to use it.

The examples in the site already look quite outdated. We now have `fetch()`, `.attachEvent` is all but dead, plus all the ES6 features like arrow functions, destructuring, spread... and reactive UI means you'll rarely, if ever, need to call DOM tree modifying methods yourself.

The best part, "Reactive UI" being a paradigm, you have many other options besides React+JSX, for example https://github.com/jorgebucaran/hyperapp. At a fraction of the size of jQuery, which one is the 'monster'?