I agree that it's largely superfluous on webapps, but I would bet a crisp $20 bill that somewhere Airbnb is running a CMS-based site somewhere that loads jQuery.
I will rely on my nailgun v. hammer analogy for this again. I understand that the big scalable web experiences are built using nailguns. But for any sort of small web project that requires just a couple of dozen lines of code, jQuery is still very much implied.
I'm a full stack who phases in and out of feontend. I'm now all in on React + MaterialUI. Even though I think they're a bit shit.
I loved jQuery. I loved doing `$(...raw html)`. But everything it did, the browsers do natively now.
You just don't really need it anymore.
> I'd also be curious what percentage of frontend roles are looking for someone proficient in jQuery versus other frameworks.
If they are using jQuery they don't need to hire a frontend engineer, because their problems are solved.
If their site requires minimal interactivity and will never scale to a point where more than 2 or 3 people work on it, then yeah absolutely.
Frontend engineer here, and I very much disagree with that sentiment. I'd also love to see what percent of the internet uses jQuery purely on the basis of traffic. There are probably a hundred million generated recipe blogspam pages that use jQuery and get 5 hits per month each, versus companies like Booking, Airbnb, Facebook, Google, etc, that get magnitudes higher amount of traffic. I'd also be curious what percentage of frontend roles are looking for someone proficient in jQuery versus other frameworks. Again, I would bet it to actually be a minority with lower salaries and companies that view their engineers as purely a cost center.
Not going to get into what role I think jQuery should play in pages and apps developed today more broadly, as I've seen that discussion hashed out a million times on HN and it never is productive.