I feel like so many people lamenting jQuery might be remembering the pain and frustration of dealing with the monstrosities people built with the library rather than the library itself.
As libraries go I think jQuery's one of the nicer ones I've used. I don't use it now, but it's pretty good software in my books and I'm glad it was there when I needed it.
This is so true. jQuery is really a fantastic library, but it gets dragged in the mud because of the applications of it. What people forget is that the adoption of SPA's preceded the widespread use of modern SPA-centric frameworks that we use today (duh). jQuery was the defacto standard library for web development before this transition, and naturally devs crowbarred together SPA behemoths using it. It turns out that it was not the ideal tool for that job, but it WAS (and still is) the perfect tool for the kind of lightweight interactivity that it was originally designed for.
Sorry for repeating your point in so many words, but the hate towards jQuery really gets me down.
The hate for jQuery has to be from people who never used Prototype and Mootools, and think that React and Vue have existed since the beginning of time. jQuery was very useful back in those days, and pretty much everyone but David Mark agreed.
As libraries go I think jQuery's one of the nicer ones I've used. I don't use it now, but it's pretty good software in my books and I'm glad it was there when I needed it.