You're forgetting one of the driving forces behind jQuery: browser incompatibilities. Now, with IE on board with HTML5 (whatever the hell that is) and most browsers at least trying to be standards-compliant, it's easy to forget that without a compatibility layer, building a cross-browser Javascript application was literally impossible.

Furthermore, jQuery offered a pretty nicely-engineered codebase and a very friendly and predictable API at a time when client-side JS was very unpredictable.

I don't use jQuery much anymore, since it's often just as easy to use plain JS. Plus, I'm often compiling so I can use a ES6 compiler to make it even nicer.

But I definitely leaned heavily on jQuery in the days prior to IE8-IE9 and client-side builds.

And even disregarding all my arguments above, I don't think it's fair to call such a carefully-designed and maintained project an "abomination", even if you do disagree with some of its technical decisions.