Remember when web development was just two cartoon characters chasing each other around your codebase? DOM manipulation with jQuery was the wild west of frontend—Tom frantically trying to select elements while Jerry kept escaping through event bubbling loopholes.
Modern devs be like "I use React hooks and state management" while secretly missing the days when you could just $('#myElement').fadeIn()
and call it a day. No virtual DOM, no component lifecycle—just pure chaos and that satisfying feeling when your animation finally worked.
The circle of frontend life: spend years moving away from jQuery only to eventually rebuild it with extra steps.