How has the process of writing front-end code with Javascript evolved over the past 5-10 years?

For a long time JQuery dominated when browsers were not as standard as they are today. That was vital for the role it filled, but it also made a lot of us, including myself, poorer coders because we relied on it too much, particularly plugins. Then there was a push for people to learn vanilla JS, which was great, but nonetheless, that took a lot of code to get things done. That leaves room for error, so libraries work to fill that gap and give everyone a common set of patterns to work from. In some ways we’re back to JQuery in that developers get pretty far away from the core, but that’s inevitable to manage complexity and be productive.