Sure, using only jQuery requires lots of thinking about your code structure and it will undoubtedly be more complex. But also: orders of magnitude faster.
It’s really, really not. You might be able to pull together some specific targeted DOM manipulation that is faster in jQuery than in React, for example, but the difference is going to be minimal and the development impact substantial.
> You might be able to pull together some specific targeted DOM manipulation that is faster in jQuery than in React, for example, but the difference is going to be minimal and the development impact substantial.
The usage difference in RAM and CPU usage will always be massive, because with jQuery (or if you're in for really high performance code, plain JS) you cut all the framework cruft and black magic away.
In addition, I would not be so sure about the development impact. JS frameworks come up every two or three years and vanish in about the same timeframe, yet the good old KISS-based dog jQuery happily barks along. jQuery devs are a dime a dozen, good luck finding someone today who does emberjs (if you want to maintain a legacy project) or knows the innards of the latest compatibility-breaking version of Webpack (if you ditch your legacy project and "relaunch" it).
I just don’t agree with this from any perspective.
First, the impact is minimal. React or a similar framework is not that big. In fact, React + ReactDOM is roughly the same code size as jQuery - 100k vs 85k minified.
Second, your custom DOM manipulation code is probably going to be a bit less optimised than a widely used library.
Third, you are overstating the difficulty. I would expect any competent front-end engineer to be able to pick up whichever of these frameworks is required. The different skills are a matter of a little on boarding and studying. Of course, there are many unskilled JS developers out there, but I don’t think that’s an excuse.
It’s really, really not. You might be able to pull together some specific targeted DOM manipulation that is faster in jQuery than in React, for example, but the difference is going to be minimal and the development impact substantial.