JQuery is widely accepted as a productive and appropriate tool for many types of projects by huge swathes of the programming community.

I currently help maintain a React app that's approximately a one dev project. It's a beast though. 900 transitive npm dependencies. Huge, brittle build process that has broken in the past and prevented us from deploying critical changes for periods of time while we debugged it. Several long-standing bugs because it's such a hassle to get into. I'm a big fan of jQuery sprinkles in light of this experience.