People were pretty supportive of each other for a long time. The community was a somewhat tighter-knit group of people just enjoying seeing what could be done with Javascript. Nowadays everything is so enterprise and formalized (see Typescript), and if you don't do X thing exactly in Y way, you're unemployable and non-"standard" (even though the "standard" changes every 6 months).

On jQuery, it hasn't really been re-invented by much these days, except for a lot of it being moved into the browser APIs directly (e.g. querySelectorAll()) which I would argue is not "re-inventing" things. Just replaced.

Anyway, maintaining Javascript projects is a chore now. People are rude, demanding, spammy, whiney, persistent, etc. It didn't use to be like this, and you don't see the same thing in other language spheres quite like you do with Javascript.