Yeah, I've been watching the same as you describe, and I think jQuery was the peak, but also the beginning of the descent into abstraction.

A couple of years ago, I realized that the art of web development is about to be lost, and I started to re-learn all those lost skills, such as direct DOM manipulation, feature-checking, backwards compatibility testing, etc.

I now have a reasonably functional website which works back to the earliest HTTP/1.1 browsers, like IE3 and NN2, classics like Windows Safari and Opera 12, and many many other lovable, once again usable browsers.