Most of us devs had "separation of concerns is critical" drilled into us for many, many years. For that reason alone, JSX just gives me the baddest of smells when I look at it.
The fact that Wordpress runs so much of the web sometimes wakes me in a cold sweat. If you're a dev worth their salt and knows proven engineering and design patterns, then Wordpress code is absolutely terrifying to look through.
Comments like yours do that for me. Every day we suspend several WP sites for failing to put basic captcha on their contacts page that results in the form being abused for email bombing.
Maybe on meeting 27 they will put the damn thing on and save themselves the headache of getting out of RBLs.
If theres one thing WP developers cant write its contact forms! :)
Yup, hard truths: vanilla JS is far less readable and clunkier than just using jQuery to do the same thing. Also, not everyone needs or wants to move to a shadow DOM framework with a zillion components and high complexity. If you're building a SPA or PWA, yes, absolutely, but for the vast majority of us who use a traditional backend/CMS-driven site with server-side rendering where client-side interactivity is needed, jQuery still does the job really nicely.
Now I might not know what I'm missing out on since I haven't worked in any projects w/ jQuery as I haven't been developing websites for a long time (and the type of sites I make probably also influences the stack), but there's probably something that does what you want as elegantly without jQuery.
We have stuff like querySelector and toggle in vanilla JS that makes it possible to change state simply, async stuff is much easier to understand than callbacks, and there are ways to split your code into components without using shadow or virtual DOM (see: raw web components, shadowdomless Lit, Svelte, etc). I've never found myself longing for something like jQuery.
If you're creating a fully interactive webapp (google maps, docs, or apple music), go with one of the frontend frameworks because they will give you a much simpler way of managing states and binding it to the view layer. But the majority of websites are not apps or shouldn't be. You'd only have a couple of interactive elements if you strip the UX to its core. And that can be done easily with server rendered templates and a bit of jquery/vanilla js.
I just can't bring myself to like or be encouraged to use any form of approach that binds together logic and presentation. It looks and smells like terrible programming. Separation of concerns matters and, as you mentioned, more seasoned devs had decades of this being drilled into us.
This was the end result I came to as well after the bigger frameworks started gaining popularity. I work primarily solo in a single organisation with server-generated (CMS driven) websites.
Yes, I could have replaced jQuery with Vanilla, but the syntax for jQuery is still so much simpler, and I care about my limited time and productivity. For me to switch over to something like React would be complete overkill.
Again, as part of a bigger team, like you, I'd most likely consider a different approach.
