> Every dependency removed from your website is a win.

Sorry that this rant is hitting you, it's nothing personal, but this is somewhat a distraction.

Deliver the slim version from your own host and with an existing HTTP connection and it's just 70 KB without compressed transfer. That's very little, even on mobile.

People are regularly missing to optimize images and will easily transfer 100s of KB in image overhead on their sites, but they cry out for jQuery?

Or throw in a bunch of analytics stuff which gets you set back a significant amount of time and connections...

Really: Using jQuery is one of the smallest problems of modern web development.

Its not just the bandwidth spent its the extra complexity of the code base. Every framework you add is an extra thing that devs have to know and in the future there will be less and less people who know jquery.

This assumes that nobody will learn "the old stuff" and only focus on the new stuff. I don't think that's how it works, otherwise we wouldn't see PHP in the wild anymore. Or anything else that's more than five years old.

On the other hand, people are integrating libraries for ANYTHING in their projects and don't care about that either.

Call me old-fashioned, but PHP + MySQL with HTML, CSS and a handful of jQuery has still brought me everywhere in terms of tech stack. Maybe I'm just doing shitty jobs, I don't know, but it works and the client is happy, so it doesn't look like a problem for me.