Many of the things that jQuery made easy back in the day are now pretty easy with pure js (Ajax calls, improved selectors, programmatic DOM manipulation, etc), and browser support for most JS features is way more standardized.
Granted, your pure JS is likely to be way more verbose to write, making it look more intimidating than jQuery.
That being said. jQuery is performant in modern browsers, and when being delivered compressed and minified is tiny, so if you want to use it, go for it. Anybody who criticizes you or tells you “you should use [x]” for your online store or website is a JS elitist.
jQuery is really only a “bad” choice for big interactive web apps, where frameworks that handle state and routing independently of the DOM are a much better choice.