JQuery should be part of the browser.

The article is obviously ridiculous (CDNs handle fetches, DOM APIs do most of what jQuery does except in-built iteration, jQuery's AJAX is poor, v2 is the current major version, we use CSS for most animations these days, etc) but:

    NodeList.prototype.forEach = Array.prototype.forEach;
    var query = document.querySelector.bind(document),
      queryAll = document.querySelectorAll.bind(document)

And patching in `classlist.js` for IE9 just to get the basics going out of the box on modern browsers does suck. And yes, I write big things in vanilla JS.

If using a CDN, the refresh tax and initial tax should be negligible -- Google's jQuery has a 1-year expiration date; code.jquery.com has an expiration date in 2037. Browsers shouldn't be re-checking them unless an explicit "reload" is used.

Yes, there's a constant tax for parsing, etc. But that can be better fixed by having browsers add general support for caching compiled versions of JavaScript libraries. This way, even sites that use less famous libraries (Dojo or AngularJS or whatever) can get the same benefits.

> It is something that has arguably become a part of javascript itself.

No, it hasn't

> Whenever, I am creating even a simple website, I include jQuery to it (even if sometime I don't need/use it).

Then you are an idiot.