One of the main Problems with JavaScript is not the language itself, but the browser implementations. It was a huge pain to write cross-browser code when jQuery came out. jQuery took away a lot of these efforts and certainly had influence on the things you can do in modern browser these days, e. g. document.querySelector.

While I don't read your comment as a criticism of jQuery, I feel that jQuery gets bashed too often these days for insufficiencies in code. In the vast majority of cases such insufficiencies are not caused by the libraries, but by the developers using them.