Just because jQuery isn't "brand, new frontend framework" doesn't mean it is good or something
From my experience jQuery leads to difficult to maintain codebases relatively fast in compare to e.g Vue.
In my experience it's the frontend frameworks that make for worse code. Callback soup is downright simple and easy-to-follow compared to some of the atrocities that React et al have wrought. Worse, they repackage old tech as "new" while completely reworking the vocabulary and paradigms, so old hats have to relearn shit they already know because some snot-nosed Facebook engineer needs another resume badge for his inevitable 18-month departure
Plain javascript, if you want to go down that route. Jquery is around 30kb of javascript, if I remember correctly.
> but that's not cool and not good on your resume
On the contrary, writing vanilla js is pretty cool and impressive on the resume, when every other developer puts react there; but it's pretty miserable too, compared to using frameworks.
I actually quite like writing vanilla js in my spare time, but I can never tell if I'm doing everything horribly wrong or not
Javascript is actually incredibly fast on most devices, especially if you are constraining yourself to the vanilla API and not something like jQuery. Remember, every web browser's JS engine has been hyper-optimized to support decades of half-assed website implementations.
It's really hard to screw up perf on document.getElementById(). There's honestly not a whole lot of ways to hang yourself with the vanilla methods unless you are trying to build something ridiculous like a raytracer or physics engine.
Can we at least do document.querySelector? Pretty please? :-)
const $ = document.querySelector.bind(document)
Svelte/Sapper also has a lot of potential as it only ships the parts if the framework that are absolutely needed instead of the whole thing.
But in reality, you can make plenty of very fast React sites and plenty of slow vanilla JS sites.
Erm what? What browsers are you talking about now?