I mean you’re coming across like more of an old man than I am and that’s saying a lot more than you know. For the first 2 years people shit talked jQuery I didn’t agree with them. And then I got the opportunity to work without it and it seriously took like 3 days to completely change my mind. And all my pages were I believe about 100KB lighter.
jQuery is trash. And that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a great tool for its time. It’s truly obsolete now though. If you hate the native JavaScript stuff so much… I dunno maybe go work with Java or something?