Why would it be the reasonable choice when it was created to solve a problem that largely doesn't exist any more?

jQuery wouldn't be created today in anything like its current form. It still lives on largely because of inertia. Using the APIs provided by the browser is in no way reinventing the wheel!

There is now a whole generation of FE developers for whom "JavaScript" is synonymous with "JQuery", as evidenced by endless questions on StackOverflow which use the terms interchangeable.

I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly.

A lot of the commenters here have a very old school view of jQuery. They seem to believe that if you're using jQuery, then you must also be employing manual DOM manipulations, manual state management, etc.

You can implement modern component-ized front-end architecture while still using jQuery. My company built an in-house front-end framework heavily inspired by React and Vue. But instead of abstracting away from the DOM, we've embraced the DOM by utilizing DocumentFragments for highly performant rendering. When our components render, they return regular ole HTMLElements.

The components built using our framework work with or without jQuery. No manual DOM manipulations, one-way data binding, sane state management, templating, child components, state triggers, etc. A lot of us use jQuery simply because we prefer it's compact and expressive syntax.

Because the wheels are proprietary and full of quirks. For instance, $('.foo') returns an array of jquery objects and not HTMLElements that you can act directly upon using the standard API that was made for replacing it.