Mentions that lots of links now from search engines take you to walled gardens. Take a peek around the rest of his site and click a link, low and behold its to skillshare, wanting me to sign up :S
I think most of the usual stuff in jQuery can be done with vanilla JS really these days. It does have its odd use but i've not needed it. Your needs may obviously differ. I would see if you can skip it though as it saves on loading more files.