I’m currently job searching and actually came across several mentions of jquery in job descriptions. It’s still alive!

Edit: 3,700,000 downloads per week on npm alone. That’s not a complete or perfect representation of usage, but that’s a significant number

What else do you need jQuery for? The most important parts are already included in the browser.

Honestly I bet a significant portion of the code I have maintained (and even some I’ve written) was reinventing a wheel someone didn’t know existed. Not even out of a desire to solve a problem, but simply not realizing it was done already.

I suspect people still reach for jquery for similar reasons. They know it makes complicated stuff work, it’s reliable, they don’t need to think about the specifics of the problems it solves… As a result, they’re less likely to discover that it’s no longer necessary in the first place. They’ll just keep using it.

The same will happen to react. React will become a victim of its success, because the more it is used the more likely its concepts will be integrated directly into the browser or ECMAScript

Maybe this is less obvious if you’re deep in the React ecosystem and nothing else but I’d argue that React is already in early stages of a death spiral for a few reasons.

These mostly come down to

1. It’s no longer the fastest, in fact it’s barely competitive speed wise with many things that have come after it.

2. It’s architectured in such a way that it is fundamentally misaligned with the rest of many web standards (I.e the DOM) which made a lot of sense when it was released but is now a major liability.

3. It now has to ship around a lot of code that now lives natively inside the browser and is now rather bloated as a result compared to newer iterations such as Lit as mentioned in the article.

Personally, I think it’s fatal in the sense that they have painted themselves into a very specific corner with no obvious engineering solution to get them back on the standards path. Its problems as a result aren’t really fixable without major architectural changes that would fundamentally change the project. On top of that they are only going to get actively worse over time as more things get moved into the browser and they are still stuck shipping a bunch of JS code to do the same thing. In short they are on a bad long term path with no clear off ramp.

I wouldn’t start a major project in React in 2022 for something I wanted to be around in 5 years from now as a result.

Never said I wasn't partial to shiny.