You are correct sir. I was trying to keep myself going on a rant. I think if you want to avoid large frameworks/build pipelines and the ugly mess that Web APIs are then jQuery fits perfectly. I have tried and failed many times writing vanilla JS for some smaller projects but always end up over budget and with code ending up looking like a worse version of jQuery. Only if you have large enough visitor count and team then using vanilla API makes practical sense because you might save couple GBs of web traffic and that is nice to see.