Indeed. I occasionally write a webbased tool to deal with a specific task (say formatting some form of codec data, or a simple dashboard for a specific event, or a small config generator, or whatever), userbase is in the <10 users (not concurrent) range, I don't give a stuff about scaling. I care that the code is in a repo (git, svn, whatever), is versioned (deb, rpm, whatever), and deploys cleanly.

I could learn and use $latest_thing, and maybe it would be great. That will triple the time taken to develop, but whatever. However in a couple of years time when I come to need to write something else, $latest_thing will be old hat, and replaced by $shiny_and_new. Rather than having 10 years of nice simple code based on jquery, I get some based on Angular, some on React, some on Vue, some on Meteor, or whatever.

I'm not a programmer, I'm not a wireman, and I'm not a carpenter. I program in the same way I'll run a network cable or get a screwdriver out, it's a tool I can use to solve a specific task. I like tools that are the same, year in, year out.

That's not to say the latest frameworks aren't all great, if you're building something for a million users and want to take advantage of shiny new features that's great, but for those that aren't, there's still a place for boring old things in a large part of the computer industry.

Take a look at zepto (or another jquery-like library), add some feature detection for IE polyfills, and switch to using fetch for ajax calls. Unless you're using a lot of jQuery dependencies, you'll cut your download size by more than half for most browsers/users.

I'd never say don't use jQuery, and it does support some options for a minimal footprint, still there's smaller options that probably have all you need.

It irks me that Javascript didn't just adopt the best parts of JQuery.

There are still things you can only do with jQuery, I can't think of a better Swiss Army knife for small tasks.

For example, fetch() is built into browsers now but it doesn't have all the features of $.ajax()

it irks me to use common functions such as selectors and Ajax in jQuery that are much, much slower than their native counterparts