You're missing the point I believe the OP was trying to make: ten+ years ago, jQuery was often by far the easiest way to implement most things. One line of jQuery could replace a dozen lines of plain JavaScript, even ignoring all the nonsense you'd have to learn about cross-browser support.

Today, so many things are possible and easier with plain JavaScript and/or CSS.

I'd even go further and say there's lots of new sites using jQuery unnecessarily because the accepted, highly-upvoted, but 10-year-old SO answer said that was the way.

To summarize: jquery used to be best answer to many JS questions. And now it never is unless the question specifies its use.

No one should be recommending the introduction of jquery (to solve some discrete issue) unless it’s already part of the stack.

But that’s exactly the opposite of how the current state of JS answers appears.

Stack Overflow's developer survey found that in 2020 43% of web developers were using jQuery and 36% were using React [0]. Still biased in favor of jQuery but not nearly as much as you say.

[0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-popular-...

Based on nothing other than intuition, I assume the Stack Overflow audience still at least slightly selects for React developers over jQuery developers, compared to the general public.

Of course, that doesn't really matter — we're talking about Stack Overflow users, and you're right that this is a way better source of data on what Stack Overflow users care about. Not sure why I didn't think to check their developer survey.

> jQuery is used on 83% of all websites;

There are a lot of websites I made in the past and they are still online and many of them use jQuery, but I don't need to check Stackoverflow in relation to those websites, because I'm no longer working on them (and in most cases no one else does either, they just happily keep running unmodified). All of those are part of that 83% that you mention.

Stackoverflow is a Q&A websites for developers so IMHO it should focus on tech that is currently in use on actively developed systems.

Even if only 10% of jQuery websites are maintained, and every single React website is, there are still almost twice as many actively developed websites using jQuery than React.

See my comment, and actually with that 10% number it doesn't hold true with only 50% of the logic applied.

50/10 vs 4*(unmaintained rate) + undercounting (possibly a large majority, possibly small) is probably React winning out

That's a fair point, I didn't think about it that way.

I still use jquery actively. Without substantial work and complexity, a typical react site's initial page load still requires an enormous javascript chunk for anything to show on the screen. When I notice a site I'm using is slow, unresponsive (interactivity wise), or buggy, more often than not the react dev extension is lit up. React (and ecosystem) may represent the future but they still have a lot of growing pains to overcome before totally replacing jquery.

I also use jQuery from time to time and I don't have anything against it, my point was not related to jQuery.

PS from your comment it sounds like you could be interested in Vue, specifically using Vue standalone without npm/webpack e.g. https://v3.vuejs.org/guide/installation.html#cdn

This doesn't make any sense. jQuery is a library for DOM manipulation. React is a view layer framework. They are totally different solutions for different problems. If jQuery suits your needs, you probably don't need jQuery at all because vanilla JS is quite capable these days.

They are both used to add client-side interactivity. I agree vanilla JS is often a capable alternative. jQuery offers a lot of convenience though.

That 83% is very shaky at best.

First, number of websites != number of platforms. If you go to the source of the number, they even point out as much:

> WordPress, which is used in more than 30% of sites, includes jQuery by default.

So right off the bat, you're looking at 50% or so, maybe plus a few for people who actually make a point to write jQuery + for wordpress specifically.

Secondly, that study has detection issues [0] that seem to not pick up a good deal of bundlers/etc, which makes it really hard to say how many of React/Vue sites are missed.

Thirdly, jQuery being used as a dependency of a library will still count it in that 83%. They show a few combination options specifically, and show it's at least 1.7% [1]. With others, say 2.5% in total. Think about how many bundlers hide React/Vue and how many common dependencies could use jQuery, and you're probably much higher.

Given all that, I'd bet that number is closer to 17% than 83%, though I'd wager around 33%.

Even with that 33% being jQuery without a framework or not being wordpress, you have to remember this is published. How many of those have had code significantly changed in the past 5 years? This is what's relevant in this context. All of this long winded nuance to say that I don't think "your average jQuery question is probably useful to many more people than your average React one" holds up, at least not like you might think that cited number shows. That's not to say it's irrelevant, just less relevant.

[0] https://github.com/AliasIO/wappalyzer/issues/2450

[1] https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2020/javascript#framework...

Agreed that it's all very directional, but I think you're discounting some of it a little too readily. Even if you're just using jQuery because it's a transitive dependency or bundled by default, you might still have issues that lead you to search Stack Overflow for help.

The broader point is, we should be cognizant of our selection bias here. SPA frameworks are overrepresented on HN because we tend to be programmers building applications in the tech industry. But there are a ton of people who don't consider themselves "in tech" that still need to make a portfolio for their photos/figure out a WordPress plugin for their e-commerce site/etc.

This seems unreliable since it weights a website maintained by a single developer in their spare time the same as a website with a dedicated team of devs working full time.

Yeah, Stack Overflow is for humans and not for websites. A billion websites maintained by 1 person don't count more than 1 website maintained by 1 person. The question is how many web developers nowadays use these technologies during their day to day activities.

A somewhat accurate test would be to look at job listings. Last time I checked. Every front end job listing asked for react/vue/angular skills.

That's probably more of a measurement of popular frameworks or libraries pulling in jquery, rather than people wanting to use it for development. Your link suggests a third of the web is wordpress, for example, but wordpress seems to want to eventually remove it as a dependency.

That 4% constitutes many large shops.