Plain JavaScript replaced it. jQuery provided useful things at its time, indeed, but JS has been somewhat improved at least and learned the tricks, even improved upon them. JS is still somewhat ugly, but I will give it at least that much. Now one does not really need jQuery any longer for most things, which were done with it. I personally find plain JS API and fetch to be cleaner than jQuery stuff even. People still use jQuery it out of habbit or, because it would be a lot of work to get rid of it everywhere.
I know. Most of its funtionality was superseeded by Js APIs which I already use (Promises vs Deferred, fetch vs. ajax). I might still need an alternative for building and editing query string parameters though. Plus most of the somewhat outdated libs in our project use it anyway.