JavaScript itself provides the functionality jQuery became popular for. So no. Check the standard lib first before considering helper libs.
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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It depends what you want to do and the amount of polyfills/backwards compatibility you need.
Nowadays most projects use one of the big frameworks like React/Vue/Svelte and others which take a vastly different approach to maintaining the DOM and for the most part you never manipulate nodes yourself, therefore you don't need jQuery and it's not used much anymore. JSX is weird at first but it's actually quite nice. Some of those libraries like SolidJS have impressively low overhead.
And for those that like to stick to just minimal JS, the browser APIs have matured a lot so a lot of jQuery isn't really necessary anymore either. We have querySelectorAll and things like Array.prototype.forEach and Array.prototype.map and arrow functions that cut down a lot on what shortcuts jQuery would offer. Visual effects are usually done with CSS animations and just switching up classes. Everything AJAX is easier and cleaner with the new fetch() function and accessories. Vanilla JavaScript is for the most part quite usable and easy these days. You can even create custom HTML elements from JavaScript to make your life easier!
But if you're looking at the jQuery API specifically, you can still use jQuery today. It's still maintained and functional. I think modern versions are pretty small too since it no longer needs half of it to be Internet Explorer hacks and other obsolete browsers that were holding web development back.
I 90% just want easy JSON POST.
Yep, that's definitely covered: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API/Using_Fetch#supplying_request_options
If you end up using a bundler and npm dependencies, axios is also pretty good and very popular HTTP client.
Yeah, Fetch is so much better than jQuery's http API. And if you need something more than Fetch, then Axios is far superior.
No, because the current practices have shifted from writing html+css+js in the classic style to using JavaScript frontend frameworks like vue, react, angular, svelte... Which offer a lot of features that would jQyery give you but also removed the need for some of them.
The paradigm has shifted and I don't think jQuery is used anymore (atleast not for new projects).
To explain this a bit further, the main difference between older jQuery-based projects and newer (React|Vue|Angular|Svelte)-based projects is imperative vs. declarative programming.
It used to be that you give commands (e.g. "when the user clicks this button, change that label content and add CSS classes to these elements"). Very quick to add something small, but also hard to grow and maintain well. It's easy to forget a command in some code paths.
Nowadays you declare state, and define how your UI is derived from that. This means you don't give commands to change things, instead you change data and your UI is updated automatically. This makes it much easier to understand a component, and allows for maintainable growth.
Jquery is a swear word in professional front end contexts, the replacement is transpilation and dropping ie support.
Personally I used jquery up until react and babel got hot, now I never touch the dom directly with jquery and no longer have a need for the polyfill features as I rely on babel preset-env to support the browsers we have selected (especially for things like promises/async await/es6+ features)
What do you still need babel for?
The only features that come to mind for anyone who needs to reach out to babel today would be those working on the tc39 proposals themselves.
IIRC most stuff can be done with vanilla JS in any modern browser.
Although, I've been doing little front-end work, and mostly for personal projects, nothing fancy nor production ready, so someone might have another opinion about using jQuery.