Agreed. I think people do tend to forget jQuery's primary use and greatness came from masking browser inconsistencies and exposing things that just weren't even possible with vanilla JS. Necessity for that type of thing has waned but someone coming into jQuery now or in the last couple years I could see the disdain if they weren't around when making your JS work in all browsers was ridiculously hard and time-consuming. It was a very, very good and useful segue tool that has run its course.
