I agree. I picked up JavaScript recently (I'm an embedded systems and firmware guy, so gimme a break!), and decided to play around with designing a basic game. Using parts off of the shelf (bootstrap, parse, and google's APIs) I could build a very pretty, responsive thing that worked well on a variety of devices.
While doing this, I was fumbling around from tutorial to tutorial, figuring out what's what (I still mis-type "backbone" and "bootstrap"). Reading through the questions that others are asking on stackoverflow, I saw a recurrent pattern. Someone would ask "How do I X?" Someone would answer "You do this, this, then that," explaining fairly-articulately the correct answer. A reply to that would be "I don't get it. Can you post a fiddle?" Sometimes inside of those, you'd see (what I think) is a mis-use of a framework. It would work, but either dragged an entire framework into the picture, or caused a tremendous amount of work to happen, when there would usually be a much simpler solution (i.e. do I -always- have to use jQuery?).
I feel like the entry level of programmer might need to change into a different title. "Software tradesman?" I'd describe these as people that know how to assemble a list of components into a working whole. They can replicate a pattern, filling in blanks where appropriate, but can't nip / tuck to change it, and certainly can't design and create a whole -new- component.
Small aside, getting rid of jQuery is kind of hard... I'm half surprised that no browser has taken the core of jQuery and simply integrated its' usage patterns in the browser at this point (considering everything else added to the DOM).
Dealing with the DOM isn't nearly has hard as it has/had been in the past, but it's still a bit more complex than jQuery's API... You can start with document.querySelector*, but then if you need an array, you need Array.from the results, then you can each/map/reduce until your heart's content... event binding is still quite a bit more verbose as well. Not to mention unbinding/cleanup when adding/removing nodes.
In the end, half the time I check "is jQuery in the project already" then I'll use it. More often than not, it is... that is except in "enterprise" projects where "enterprise" architects and the minions of developers have managed to introduce 3-4 different copies of varying old/ancient versions of jQuery and no idea which one is actually loaded. Because it's "just the front end" and have no concept/concern for actual load/performance... don't think about capturing state properly, and get weird behavioral patterns as a result.
Sorry for the rant, it just irks me that people are so dismissive of the front end or capability that the web offers because much of it is so easy to get results. On another note, if you get more into it, do yourself a favor and avoid Angular.
I guess the 3-4 copies of jQuery are my point; that's generally indicative of a misunderstanding of how things work.
Taking my own learning as an example, I want to build a single-page application, so I decided that I needed a framework to manage it, since that's what all the cool kids were doing. While sipping on a frosty beverage, I was comparing Backbone and Angular, and then realized that Parse (which I'd already decided to use) built their JS API on top of backbone. That quickly simplified things for me, but I still see people that are trying to bolt together angular and parse.
I see so many "oh just do it with jquery" comments on forums.. when in reality, 9 times out of 10, you just need some simple one-off function from it.. you end up loading some massive script to run 2 functions... oh wait, is that why compilers exist? :-) really what we need is a way to get jquery to extract out just the functions you want in a standalone way...
While doing this, I was fumbling around from tutorial to tutorial, figuring out what's what (I still mis-type "backbone" and "bootstrap"). Reading through the questions that others are asking on stackoverflow, I saw a recurrent pattern. Someone would ask "How do I X?" Someone would answer "You do this, this, then that," explaining fairly-articulately the correct answer. A reply to that would be "I don't get it. Can you post a fiddle?" Sometimes inside of those, you'd see (what I think) is a mis-use of a framework. It would work, but either dragged an entire framework into the picture, or caused a tremendous amount of work to happen, when there would usually be a much simpler solution (i.e. do I -always- have to use jQuery?).
I feel like the entry level of programmer might need to change into a different title. "Software tradesman?" I'd describe these as people that know how to assemble a list of components into a working whole. They can replicate a pattern, filling in blanks where appropriate, but can't nip / tuck to change it, and certainly can't design and create a whole -new- component.