I'm there with you, except that jQuery in 2015(/2016) is not just about fashion; it's about technical merit.
The biggest selling point for jQuery was unifying the mess of browser APIs under one, consistent API. Back in 2006 browser support for ecmascript was so haphazard that writing vanilla JS was an absolute ache. Or so I hear.
As years progress, browsers become steadily more conformant. In tandem, jQuery's value drops.
Meanwhile, cost (speed, size) remains constant.
This argument can be made without considering fashion; even if nobody had ever written a single library after John Resig did, jQuery in 2015 could still be considered an strange choice just for that.
Agree, there are technical merits, jquery is not designed to separate model and controller code from the view. It can obviously be done but most jquery code i've seen are injected smack middle inside the business logic, selecting a few elements from the DOM based on their css-classes(?!) and then modifies them in place. I wrote shit like this myself a few years ago but the more i think about it today the more absurd it sounds. It simply doesn't invite you to write good code and almost requires another framework on top for you to do so. It's a much more low level tool than other frameworks, and might therefor be the perfect job for something as complicated as a spreadsheet.
The biggest selling point for jQuery was unifying the mess of browser APIs under one, consistent API. Back in 2006 browser support for ecmascript was so haphazard that writing vanilla JS was an absolute ache. Or so I hear.
As years progress, browsers become steadily more conformant. In tandem, jQuery's value drops.
Meanwhile, cost (speed, size) remains constant.
This argument can be made without considering fashion; even if nobody had ever written a single library after John Resig did, jQuery in 2015 could still be considered an strange choice just for that.