I mean, sure, I can use the lower level API to check in a separate step. The point of a library is to provide the functionality to reduce the boiler plate checking.

alright then. sounds like you're able to make an informed decision for yourself. when i was doing jquery dev i never needed so much event delegation that avoiding an occasional 1-liner for event filtering* justified using a lib that's 10x larger.

* in limited cases like tabular data or large lists