On: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

[jenscow]

> That said I'm interested in what jQuery can do that vanilla JS can't.

jQuery is written in JS, so jQuery can't do what JS can't.

The main reason for using jQuery, as you say, is a cleaner API for DOM manipulation...

    $(".something").parent().append($("<button />").text("click me").click(fn));

If you know nothing about jQuery, you can guess what that does. Of course, you can do it in vanilla JS too. However it's a little harder to write and (more importantly) read.