I've depended on jQuery, not a strictly front end designer myself but have done a bit of client side dev the past 20 years.

If I had a choice, I'd go with one of the reactive libraries, I've used Vue. For me, if you're relying on Javascript IMO it gets the job done quicker.

It'd be interesting to see what jquery is used for in aggregation of all its usage. For me it was always selecting element(s) and XHR requests. With fetch (and a polyfill for IE), and the likes of querySelector it seems that a lot of the problems jquery solved have also been solved by the majority of popular browsers.

I say that as a layman of client side dev, happy to be corrected.