Bashing DOM nodes together to do a task is merely one manifestation of this. Multi-thousand line functions, code that makes thousands of queries to a DB and manually performs some enormous task that could have been more easily done in three slightly more complicated ones, code that just flings open a socket every time it needs to do something on the network and just starts stuffing bytes at a remote service... it's all manifestations of this.
I don't have a good word for this. I wish I did. Probably something buried on C2 somewhere if I poke around hard enough.
I suppose that's what I was getting at originally. There's absolutely nothing that removing or adding jQuery will do to impact the larger problem of treating client-side development as software engineering instead of incoherent scripting. None of the advice on the originally posted site would change those organizational/logical problems.
These are the things that get cleared up by code reviews, break sprints, bug hunts, periodic refactoring… in many cases, YANGTNI applies. That's not an excuse for long-term sloppy code, but it's an excuse for developing good practice when making changes to an existing codebase.
