IMO jQuery is a symptom, not a cause. It’s the natural end-state of a stringly-typed “do whatever the fuck you want” attitude. You can create just as much spaghetti without jQuery, jQuery just lets you do it with less characters.

The horrors I’ve seen. Constructing a custom string based off of user input and then tacking on () and calling it as a function? We can do that? Apparently yes we can. The most cursed type of polymorphism where nothing makes sense and you’d have more success communing with the dead than deducing the control flow.