I think there’s also a factor of doing so much which has now been standardized in browsers: imagine a hypothetical jQuery 4 which mostly focused on DOM/CSS compatibility and used native ES6 where possible, always using the standard names and signatures for things which are only partially supported. I think that’d help people focus on the more ergonomic parts rather than whether you type each or forEach.

When I look at the examples and seeing how verbose some of the natives examples are I would probably end up writing something similar to jQuery to keep the main code simple. Maybe that's the way to go.

That's what I was thinking — imagine if you started now with things like the ES6 array & NodeList methods, etc. as the model to follow and built the same convenience methods without needing to deal with horrors like the IE6 DOM. $(foo).css("color") would still be useful but you might end up with $(".foo").forEach(…), $(foo).classList.add("foobar") or $.fetch(…) to reduce the number of new nouns and verbs a developer needs to remember.

The world is indeed strange. I remember the dark days of getting a robust client-side UI, complete with AJAX, drag and drop operations, etc. working properly in both IE and Netscape. jQuery seemed too good to be true when it first came out.