LMFAO every example of "modern" looks like a course in how not to design an API, etc. The jQuery examples are so clean and expressive. Imagine landing on a page like that and thinking, "hey, that 'modern' option looks good." You'll end up with 28KB (jQuery gzipped size) of just extra syntax before you're done with your app, not to mention the additional 160 hours of work.
You'll likely be adding 6-700KB of React and its ilk anyway (I see it in every project now).
The code I write these days is cleaner and more readable than anything I did back in the jQuery days. The only thing I add (for bigger projects) is Typescript.
With jQuery it feels like a lot of functionality is hidden away, which can lead to unexpected situations that are harder to debug.
In my experience writing vanilla code takes less time, not more, because I have a better grip on what is happening.
Just in case this comment gets flagged, here is the original text:
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Sigh.
There are people who cannot program and fortunately for those people there is jQuery. Writing any kind of UI in vanilla JS is trivial and even more so with TypeScript. If that takes you a 160 hours to complete you are not the guy to be doing that work. I could pay my pest control guy to figure it out. Maybe it might take him 160 hours.
JQuery used to make sense back in the days of IE, especially before IE9, and your team was green. Even then most cross browser issues were in CSS, not JS. Those days are long gone.
You'll likely be adding 6-700KB of React and its ilk anyway (I see it in every project now).