It's good for quick things and prototyping cause you can always swap out those calls with native later. It's API is generally easier to remember/less typing that most native equivalents. You can also use its API serverside via Cheerio to do parsing & manipulation of html without a dom.
edit: also its way more lightweight than React/Vue/Svelte i don't necessarily disagree you shouldn't reach for jQuery if you have a dynamic page (something like uhtml+preact signals would be good if you have fair bit of rendering logic going on) but I would say you should totally try seeing how far you can get with jQuery instead of Svelte/React/Vue on simple pages.
Is it really way more lightweight than Svelte? Svelte has more tooling (of course) but it ships no runtime and only sends the user the JS they actually need to interact with your page.
edit: also its way more lightweight than React/Vue/Svelte i don't necessarily disagree you shouldn't reach for jQuery if you have a dynamic page (something like uhtml+preact signals would be good if you have fair bit of rendering logic going on) but I would say you should totally try seeing how far you can get with jQuery instead of Svelte/React/Vue on simple pages.