Recently, I have developed a small page where I wanted not to use jQuery on purpose and code against the DOM APIs instead. For IE8 compatibility I have used [1] (so I could use addEventListener and DOMContentLoaded for example), and also shims for ES5 [2] (e.g. Array.prototype.forEach) and classList [3]. While I did not run in any troubles, I don't think it is worth the effort, alone just because jQuery has a much nicer and shorter API (cp. ".on()" vs. ".addEventListener()").

But I still support the case that not every plugin/library developer should depend on jQuery by default, even if it is not necessary.

[1] https://github.com/WebReflection/ie8 [2] https://github.com/es-shims/es5-shim [3] https://github.com/eligrey/classList.js