jQuery was an essential stepping stone back when JS was lacking a ton of features that people take for granted these days.
Sure everything could have been done with Vanilla JS but it was verbose and difficult to follow. jQuery made it possible for any developer to quickly make a page dynamic
This was my experience too. At first I found code reviews to be an invaluable resource for improving my code. But I then reached a point where I'd learned everything I could from a particular reviewer.
I'd submit code that met every criteria, but the reviewer would still nit pick on tiny details that were entirely subjectective. It was no longer about the quality of code it became about the reviewer trying to put their mark on my work.
The only solution was to either ignore their nits or adopt the hairy arm technique whereby you include intentional errors for the reviewer to comment on so they feel their time had been valuable and you get away without yours being wasted.