JavaScript itself provides the functionality jQuery became popular for. So no. Check the standard lib first before considering helper libs.

As mentioned, JavaScript may have everything you need. Check out https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

It depends what you want to do and the amount of polyfills/backwards compatibility you need.

Nowadays most projects use one of the big frameworks like React/Vue/Svelte and others which take a vastly different approach to maintaining the DOM and for the most part you never manipulate nodes yourself, therefore you don’t need jQuery and it’s not used much anymore. JSX is weird at first but it’s actually quite nice. Some of those libraries like SolidJS have impressively low overhead.

And for those that like to stick to just minimal JS, the browser APIs have matured a lot so a lot of jQuery isn’t really necessary anymore either. We have querySelectorAll and things like Array.prototype.forEach and Array.prototype.map and arrow functions that cut down a lot on what shortcuts jQuery would offer. Visual effects are usually done with CSS animations and just switching up classes. Everything AJAX is easier and cleaner with the new fetch() function and accessories. Vanilla JavaScript is for the most part quite usable and easy these days. You can even create custom HTML elements from JavaScript to make your life easier!

But if you’re looking at the jQuery API specifically, you can still use jQuery today. It’s still maintained and functional. I think modern versions are pretty small too since it no longer needs half of it to be Internet Explorer hacks and other obsolete browsers that were holding web development back.

Jquery is a swear word in professional front end contexts, the replacement is transpilation and dropping ie support.

Personally I used jquery up until react and babel got hot, now I never touch the dom directly with jquery and no longer have a need for the polyfill features as I rely on babel preset-env to support the browsers we have selected (especially for things like promises/async await/es6+ features)

Nowadays people use HTMX

A lot of jQuery’s features are now available in native JS - would also suggest just using native JS anyway because jQuery won’t throw any errors into the console if a selector matches no elements etc.

The only additional library I’ve needed recently for (personal work) is Axios for requests - easier than working with the Fetch API in some cases