> Now I know what you may be thinking, that doesn’t sound like a lot of data, especially compared to images which can be multiple megabytes in size. But when it’s on every page, from a web performance perspective, it equates to a lot of data.

Er... the utility of jQuery in 2022 aside, I would say: if it equates to a lot of data when it's on every page (of a single website), you're doing something wrong?! I mean, caching content between different domains is not a thing anymore, but on the same domain jQuery should only be loaded once?

Yeah but for what?

I have been writing vanilla js for years now and aside from the sometimes slightly more convenient syntax I haven't missed a thing where using jQuery would have helped me over not using it.

I don't say anything against loading useful javascript libraries, but too many websites load 1 MB of libraries just to get a result that they could have achieved with a few lines of handcrafted vanilla js.

This is not just about performance, but every piece of code you add increases the attack surface and the number of moving parts that can fail. Not that every webpage has to be minimalist and barebones, but there are tradeoffs to be made and too many people just import the whole world, their neighbour and their dog without a second thought.

jQuery is more convenient to use than vanilla JS. Vanilla JS is too verbose. If only jQuery was modular and didn't require to load 300 or 400 Kb of code.

Also it is difficult to find non-jQuery library of a good quality. For example, I was looking for a small library to send and receive JSON via HTTP, and ended up writing my own wrapper around XMLHttpRequest (fetch() is a poor choice, it is not supported well in older browsers and it has no advantages, and fetch() requests cannot be aborted) because there was no good library for this. Other libraries either do not support all necessary browsers or are overengineered and too large.

I'm with you on fetch() requests not being able to be aborted, but I didn't think there were any other reasons to use XMLHttpRequest over fetch in 2022. I've been fetch() only for a few years as this point - what older browsers are you targeting that don't support fetch()?

Internet Explorer and older browsers support is important too. You must support browsers released within last 10 years and fetch is too new and experimental for this. I don't want to use something just because it is new and has no clear advantages over older technology.

If you still need to support old IE you can use a library like https://github.com/github/fetch