Fair point, though for dynamic and large DOMs I dislike having to go and check whether I’m touching more than one element sometimes — not always though, sometimes it great to just $(‘#bleh’).hide() or what have you! Depends really
That's completely fair, and there are cases where unknowingly selecting and applying complex operations to many nodes is problematic but I think it's a great baseline/default regardless.
Many of jQuery's operations implicitly apply to the entire nodeset regardless of the nodeset's arity.