Part of Remy Sharp’s argument that jQuery is still relevant is this incredible usage data:
I’ve been playing with BigQuery and querying HTTP Archive‘s dataset … I’ve queried the HTTP Archive and included the top 20 [JavaScript libraries] … jQuery accounts for a massive 83% of libraries found on the web sites.
This corroborates other research, like W3Techs:
jQuery is used by 96.2% of all the websites whose JavaScript library we know. This is 73.1% of all websites.
And BuiltWith that shows it at 88.5% of the top 1,000,000 sites they look at.
Even without considering what jQuery does, the amount of people that already know it, and the heaps of resources out there around it, yes, jQuery is still relevant. People haven’t stopped teaching it either. Literally in schools, but also courses like David DeSandro’s Fizzy School. Not to mention we have our own.
While the casual naysayers and average JavaScript trolls are obnoxious for dismissing it out of hand, I can see things from that perspective too. Would I start a greenfield large project with jQuery? No. Is it easy to get into trouble staying with jQuery on a large project too long? Yes. Do I secretly still feel most comfortable knocking out quick code in jQuery? Yes.