It could be accomplished just as easily by writing your own function just as jQuery did.
My point is that such wording, as above, gave people the impression that jQuery was not javascript and you could not accomplish things in vanilla js. Such false impressions are still around today.
I dunno - I don't think you're gonna win that battle. When a library is sufficiently advanced it often becomes a distinct entity (linguistically, at least) from whatever it's built upon.
See also: React, Pandas, Numpy, Boost, etc.
It might be confusing to those without the context to understand that e.g. React is built on vanilla JS, but I think it's pretty clear to most people that jQuery is built on JavaScript.
In fact the term "vanilla JS" mostly started in response to jQuery itself, so if anything I would argue that the term "vanilla JS" is to blame for what you're talking about.
Sure, and we could all just design our own chips, hand code our own binary to create our custom programming language we use for everything... But humans have a neat ability to benefit from other humans' work.
An attempt to compare writing JavaScript to designing our own chips is a typical response I see from certain individuals online all the time. No knowledgeable person would ever do such a thing but I see it on reddit, and other amateur forums, all the time.
My point is that such wording, as above, gave people the impression that jQuery was not javascript and you could not accomplish things in vanilla js. Such false impressions are still around today.