All the people that hate on jQuery in 2016 either forgot or were not there when it came out and provided a unified solution for the mess that were browsers at the time. Its biggest selling point is not as compelling any more.

Amen. When jQuery hit the scene, it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's ubiquitous for a reason.

A victim of its own success, but a success that everyone benefits from.

You're looking at it from an overly pessimistic perspective. jQuery didn't solve any new problems, there were tons of libraries that solved the exact same problems in different ways at the time that it came out, like MooTools, Dojo, and Scriptaculous/Prototype. jQuery was not innovative, it didn't save the world from anything. It's biggest selling point was that the code was easy for designers to pick up, eliminating a lot of the need for the designer/developer dichotomy.

tldr; jQuery's success was not innovation or unification, it was an easy to pick up syntax. From there it was all inertia.

Yep. Knowing how to get the most out of jQuery, in 2016, mostly means knowing when not to use it.