Puter interacts directly with the DOM and jQuery provides an elegant yet powerful API to manipulate the DOM, handle events, and much more. It's also fast, mature, and battle-tested.
'Elegant' my fucking ass. Convenient? Sure. But it's far from 'elegant'.
If someone reaches for jquery as an abstraction layer over JavaScript in 2024, I immediately question everything else. You're pulling in the jquery library for a set of features, followed by hundreds of features you won't use.
Absolutely no reason why you can't recreate the same features in JavaScript, with a much smaller footprint.
Jquery is just shorthand, really -- unless things have changed in the last decade (which doesn't seem likely in the world of technology! /s), jquery is basically a way to stop writing document. GetElementById() and element.classList.add() over and over.
Don't get me wrong, that shorthand was a valuable and unique addition to a tool set -- jQuery code was much easier to read and maintain than vanilla js, for sure. But I feel like now that websites usually have build steps, using jQuery involves a lot more effort than just not using it, that, with its kind of naive approach to DOM manipulation, is where the hate comes from, imo. It's probably still a great choice in a traditional LAMP stack build.
I started using VPNs and Tor a lot more over the last couple of years, and I had no idea how many websites are just like, "Oh, we can't collect data on you? Then you can't use our website."