jQuery is like WordPress. There may be other more streamlined, purpose-built solutions out there, and they all have their uses, but sometimes ease of setup is the thing you're optimizing for, sexiness be damned.

When you have a vast, mature ecosystem and a decade and a half of community knowledge to draw upon, even the most obscure use cases tend to have a precedent somewhere. Being able to jump right to a StackOverflow answer to exactly what you're trying to do is, in my opinion, a highly underrated feature of legacy web technology.