There's a point to using this: it's a nice little convenience that a lot of people like about jQuery's style that requires no dependencies, can be copied & pasted without introducing a blob of possibly fragile code, and should have basically zero impact on performance. Try thinking of it as an idiom instead of a library. If you honestly think that all syntax that can be described as shorthand has no point you're missing a lot of expressiveness. That attitude tends to lead to littering code with the kind of laboriously spelled out replacements for the standard library that someone new to a language is prone to.

Is your background mainly Java or perhaps K&R-era C? I can understand how coming from that you might not be used to the little convenient tweaks you can make to a more dynamic language.