@michal : true - I work not only in well lighted rooms, but also out in the sun - while commuting or at a coffee shop. That's the primary reason I can't handle dark themes - they are just impossible to read in such conditions. The secondary reason why I don't use dark themes is that I use the web a lot - its my second best tool (after my code editor) and most web sites are not very dark theme friendly.

jQuery is the king of "quick and dirty" (TM) - both by bringing ease of development to a huge community of young developers (when HTML was the thing that an up and coming geek needed to know and "dynamic HTML" was how they learned software development) and with poor plugin syntax that relegated modular design to a bunch of string handlers and magic functions, and lumping everything under a huge messy namespace. Today, we know better. Developers have grown up and try to use good modular design with Javascript module loading, strict name spacing and micro libraries that embrace the UNIX way - do one thing and do it well. In such an ecosystem, jQuery is seen as a huge kludge.

As far as I understand, this is the correct answer to the OP. Why do companies with a large IT infrastructure willing to pay extra to get IE8 support? Because their IT infrastructure has standardized on stock Windows 7 (which comes with IE8, and not IE9 like another poster here claimed), and until they move away from that platform (sometime in late 2017), IE8 is the standard supported browser. I've been in such a company (I wont name names, but its a leading computer technology provider, possibly the leading provider) which works exactly like that. Recent engineering systems come pre-installed with Windows 8 and now 10, but anything else is running Windows 7 with a stock configuration.