You've never inherited a terrible, unmaintainable React or Angular app? I have on multiple occasions, and in fact my team is dealing with one right now. I'd prefer a jQuery mess to an Angular/React mess any day of the week. With old-school jQuery apps, at least I can get them to build and can debug the control flow.

A couple of years ago I inherited a client's static site that was written in React before Next.js took off. It is a real accomplishment to make a static site as unnecessarily unmaintainable and convoluted as that one was.

Part of my screening process is making sure something like that doesn't fall in my lap again. Even static sites aren't safe these days.

> jQuery promotes bad development patterns

If you do web development as a job, it's your responsibility to stay up to date on what best practices are. With EC2015 being several years ago now, jQuery wouldn't be a learner's starting point today.

Those that developed bad habits during jQuery's heyday a decade ago may still be writing bad code. And it's someone else's job to clean that up. That's the circle of life, and it's hardly exclusive to jQuery users.

The article explains why jQuery doesn't promote bad development patterns. That is a consequence of bad development and a misunderstanding of what jQuery is.