The major criticism of jquery comes from its &quot;overhead&quot; which comes from wrapping a lot of functionalities onto relatively(at the time of its onset) large file[1]. While they were legitimate(internet was slow) at the time, at its cost jquery worked as a go-to-solution for browser incompatibility. This was a major issue which jquery solved magnificently.<p>And frankly, a significant portion of jquery usages are a very limited set of functionalities: selection, class manipulation, some visible on&#x2F;off, <i>AJAX and promises</i>. A lot of those don&#x27;t necessarily need jquery[2]. Some hard-core guys go so far as to separately download only modules[3] which works.<p>Honestly, I wouldn&#x27;t mind calling a significant portion of jquery to be &quot;pure javascript&quot; as it lets me not worry about browser compatibilities and pleasant stuff that <i>should have been part of standard library</i>. ES6 is supposedly fix most of the complaints, but whether browsers will support them or not is a different question.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mathiasbynens.be&#x2F;demo&#x2F;jquery-size" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mathiasbynens.be&#x2F;demo&#x2F;jquery-size</a> has a nice tabular info on how large jquery file sizes were.<p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youmightnotneedjquery.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youmightnotneedjquery.com&#x2F;</a> is a widely cited source.<p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jquery&#x2F;jquery&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;src" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jquery&#x2F;jquery&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;src</a>, go nuts.