I remember getting into an argument with my boss in 2005 because I told him that I mainly used jQuery to avoid having to deal with browsers having entirely different APIs to do AJAX request and otherwise avoid learning all the details of Javascript that were different on different browsers.

That’s not necessary today because so much has been standardized. I find the CSS-selector based model to be appealing but you can get so many “spooky action at a distance” problems and it particularly drives me nuts in React applications where application state (not necessarily React state) can be manipulated both in React and also by jQuery behind React’s back.

People who are interested in declarative approaches are into HTMX and similar toolkits now.