I've been having discussions with a bunch of my developer friends lately, and across everything, with all the quibbling, the one thing everyone seems to agree on, and agree is one of the best parts about web development in the modern day, is that JQuery can be pretty reliably left out of any project they're working on, which just kinda... happened. All of them one day realized that they just don't need it anymore.
Looking at you, mk and insomniasexx
I don't think jQuery has really ever been necessary since W3C got together for HTML5 and agreed on browser standards and generally trying to make things look and work the same across them. It's still not quite there yet. But the closer they get the more native Javascript probably appeals to JS developers who know their shit.
jQuery is just excellent for shorthanding everything, and unless you know everything about the DOM (and I don't know squat) jQuery's syntax is still much more simple and probably easier to develop with.