Do people still use jQuery? I thought the biggest advantage of this library back in the day was css selector access of DOM nodes (back when we only had getElementById, getElementsByClassName, and getElementsByTagName). This has been rolled into the Javascript document api via document.querySelector, and document.querySelectorAll. Also there are browser compatibility issues that jQuery solved but a lot of these are so…
jQuery is like WordPress. There may be other more streamlined, purpose-built solutions out there, and they all have their uses, but sometimes ease of setup is the thing you're optimizing for, sexiness be damned. When you have a vast, mature ecosystem and a decade and a half of community knowledge to draw upon, even the most obscure use cases tend to have a precedent somewhere . Being able to jump right to a StackOver…
I won’t even speak of the ecosystem built on the above principles.
All I can say is that a 1-click install does translate to popularity :)