> Side benefit: also no weird $(thing)[0] when you need to use a DOM API, like HTML5 validity or whatever.

But looping over querySelectorAll() is painful. I'm not really a frontend dev, so perhaps I'm doing it wrong, but this is the "easier" way I found when I was writing an app a few weeks ago (in TypeScript):

  // Get Array of HTMLElements from querySelectorAll().
  let queryAll = (q: string): HTMLElement[] => {
    let nodes = document.querySelectorAll(q);

    let arr: HTMLElement[] = [];
    arr.length = nodes.length;

    for (let i = 0; i < nodes.length; i++) {
      if (!(nodes[i] instanceof HTMLElement)) {
        arr.length--;
        continue;
      }

      arr[i] = nodes[i] as HTMLElement;
    }

    return arr;
  };