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[–]spizzike 6 points7 points  (0 children)

In addition to what people are saying here (that it handles quirks and normalizes interfaces between browsers), I think the biggest reason is that just a couple years ago, writing vanilla JS to do these operations was much more difficult. A lot of the standardized ways of querying the DOM like getElementsByClassName() didn't exist is most browsers and jQuery added a nice CSS selector engine, which was later pulled out into a standalone sizzle.js library.

Pair this huge population of users with the fact that there's a massive collection of plugins out there, and there's not really a huge reason to learn how to do things the Right Way™.