People were doing this 15 years ago, before all the hipster web designers picked up javascript, opened terminal and called themselves programmers.
I"m sure the old JS programmers moved on to a real programming language, but they put you new guys to complete shame, and they didn't need 18 dependencies and a dependency manager to get it done.
jQuery was a great invention for web development, but everything since then has been total crap. Angular, React, Node, all of it's crap. The only people who like it are those who aren't smart enough to be real programmers.
I'm working on a new JS framework that using a heavily modified Vim to allow you to write programs using only punch cards. But for it to work you have to be wearing a t-shirt that's one size too small and a scarf. It's not even done yet I'm already working a re-write in GO and Rust.
The real lesson learned here is that people stopped talking about what made this guy famous, and in an attempt to kick the fires and get the flames going again, he's doing whatever it takes to bring the story back into the public eye so that we will once again call on him for his expertise.