Side note, sick of jQuery being always associated with spaghetti in the tech lexicon.

Any Turing-complete system is spaghetti in the hands of bad programmers. And simple & clear in the hands of good ones who know how to design.

Jquery is good for dom manipulation, though most of the best ideas have become vanilla javascript standards.

It isn’t really equipped or opinionated on statefulness, which means that everybody was at one point kludging stuff onto it that didn’t make sense.

Languages... (is jQuery a language, I guess so, let's go with that)... live in a context... there is culture, tooling, libraries, frameworks. Some languages have good culture, some have bad culture. I guess it's not even so black and white: language have good or bad culture in different areas: testing, cleanliness, coding standards, security, etc. If jQuery is misused in the hands of bad programmers ALL THE TIME, that becomes the culture. Not much to do about it anymore once the concrete has set. You can't still be an exception to rules, good for you! But that doesn't change the culture...?

It drives me crazy when it used together with React —- I want to have one authoritative copy of the state of my app, and jQuery bypasses that, at least if I’m using controlled forms.

Now I used to hate uncontrolled forms but now I like react-hook-form.