The new school frameworks' purpose is pretty much entirely orthogonal to that of jQuery's, although their features do overlap, which is I think why people mistakenly say what you just said so often.

Angular, Ember, etc. are frameworks for coding routing, components, state, etc. Barely any of this was the concern of jQuery, which the main purpose of jQuery was to provide a lingua franca for interacting with browsers that were inconsistent in their implementation of javascript.

Well, I would argue that the main purpose of jQuery was to help cover all the strange DOM edge cases of the browsers of that time. In that case, it really isn't needed anymore as most browsers behave the same on like 90% of the things now. (It's just that people used it as if it was a Framework, not a library which caused a bunch of problems.)

I am with you that if I'm doing something lightweight I don't use any of the new fancy JS frameworks, I just write vanilla JS.

jquery + vue.js on rails is pretty sweet

and no npm dependency BS!