Exactly. I know I don't need jQuery, but sometimes it's nice to be able to do stuff like make an ajax request as a one liner vs 10+ lines.

Peoples gripes with jQuery come from people importing the entire library to do one thing, like add a class to an element. Sure, in that case it's dumb to load the entire library for that single purpose. But if you're using it for 5 things? 10 things? It quickly becomes worthwhile.

https://caniuse.com/#search=fetch For IE, you can use a polyfill if needed.

Small detail, what's with the plus in this code from that site:

    last = +new Date();

It is a trick to coerce it to an integer.

    >> new Date()
    Date 2019-05-27T12:52:41.932Z
    >> +new Date()
    1558961556913
    >> +"4" // works on anything else :)
    4

+ can concatenate strings. So I guess there is an implied: 0 + in there to make it in integer mode.

There's no implication involved. It's the unary operator, and it performs the type conversion exactly as specced.

TIL, https://scotch.io/tutorials/javascript-unary-operators-simpl...

converts the date object to a unix timestamp* (int). a + works for coercing stuff to numbers. e.g. +"0.5" is quicker than paraseFloat("0.5") and also saves you from having to know if you need to use parseFloat or parseInt. coersion to strings can also be done by appending to an empty string: "" + 0.5.

* in ms

Yeah, that site makes a really good case for using jQuery.