I remember building web apps in the days before jQuery, it was a mess. The DOM APIs were full of quirks, and all the libraries that predated jQuery had their own issues.
These days, we have better options for building complex web apps, including much-improved native APIs. I don't think I've started a new project using jQuery in 10 years. But for maintainin a lightweight website that just needs a little bit of interaction or pizzazz, I still think jQuery is perfectly fine.
Today it's not nearly as bad as it was before. I personally have very few reasons to use jQuery. Maybe it's somewhat shorter code and supports some cool pseudoselectors (IMHO, they are often bad patterns) but for me it's often easier to understand and debug a code using vanilla JS. For example, sometimes I have struggled to find the exact event listener callback by using dev tools because when you use nested click events because the code passes throw a lot of jQuery code before reaching the actual event listener.
These days, we have better options for building complex web apps, including much-improved native APIs. I don't think I've started a new project using jQuery in 10 years. But for maintainin a lightweight website that just needs a little bit of interaction or pizzazz, I still think jQuery is perfectly fine.