Building tools and extending what is currently made available to developers by the platform - all this is in our very natures as developers. We did that even in the early days, when low-level primitives were mostly missing to support us in that work.
Jake Archibald explains this in a comment on Nat Duca's post over at G+[1] - give developers some primitives; see what they do with them - then distill it and create high-performance features out of what now you already know there is a market for. TC39 works on this basic principle (everybody whines about types in JavaScript - TypeScript might be the JavaScript's jQuery here, paving the way for some distilled type system in JS (or SoundScript. or anything else that's out there).
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As for Apple - I am siding with Peter-Paul Koch on this[2] - Apple had some quite a few good deeds in favor of the web, but that was a long time ago. Nowadays it just seems to be protecting its walled garden that is native apps & the related ecosystem - certainly not giving a whole lot about making the web a better place (or devs, for that matter). The Pointer Events fiasco is a perfect reminder to all this.
For any good Apple has did to the web, the surely made equal bad so the scales are (IMHO, at most) 50-50 here.
[1]: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+NatDuca/posts/De8Bv6F4fyB
[2]: http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/02/tired_of_saf...
Say what you will about the relative inelegance of jQuery, at the time of its release it certainly made JS--particularly DOM manipulation and AJAX--very accessible and cross-browser compliant. It definitely made articles like this seem quaint. [1][2]
At about the time of jQuery's release, Flash development was a viable alternative for smaller sites. I was doing bits and pieces of freelance around 2007 and after the iPhone came out, even my least tech-saavy clients stopped talking about Flash.
Pretty sure that these two bits made it so that every front end dev/ designer in the world was at least passably decent at Javascript by the time Node arrived.
[1] http://boxesandarrows.com/htmls-time-is-over-lets-move-on/ [2] Also, Mootools and Prototype and YUI etc, but jQuery is the one that became ubiquitous