It's not that their API is convoluted, but generally what is being generated by a developer is. It's easy to fall down the jQuery rabbit hole, and start making messy decisions, by just using every possible thing available. Reminds me a lot of early PHP developers, writing spaghetti code because it's easy to do so. I'm currently in the process of converting some of my OWN 10+ year old PHP to Node, and it's difficult to sift through it all. My experience with reading a lot of jQuery stuff is similar. Easy to pick up, and do a lot of magic, which means easy to make a mess.