I'll offer my 2¢. I went to school for graphic design - and while they did show us HTML and CSS, I've never had any computer science, programming, or JS training.
I had been building websites for around a decade, working in and around JavaScript, but never able to make any sense of it before I decided to try to really learn what was going on.
I struggled and struggled with the 'easy' jQuery code that promised to make everything simple, yet I was struggling to understand. To me it often felt like riding the train when you want to take a car - sure the train is fast, easy, and direct, but it doesn't always go to the locations you want to end up. Instead of getting in a car and going directly from point A to point B (your destination), jQuery has you making numerous 'simple' hops from Station A to Station F, then a simple hop over to Station E, then an easy ride to Station D which gets you kind of close to Station B. As you can see, all the 'simple' shortcuts can end up being a maze if you're trying to do anything slightly different than their pre-designated course. Trying to navigate your entire app like that ends up not saving you time, leading to code that breaks easily, and it still takes a lot of time and effort to figure out how to write.
Finally, I decided to try to write vanilla JavaScript with no jQuery and no other libraries. It wasn't until that moment that I was able to begin understanding what JavaScript was doing. The higher level of abstraction provided by jQuery had been serving as an impediment to learning what JavaScript was doing this whole time.
You know the craziest thing—even though in some cases jQuery saves you a few characters of typing, overall when you look at the total codebase, whenever I refactor old jQuery code into vanilla JS the vanilla JS version usually turns out to be smaller overall. It's funny how that works out, but it's happened more often than not.
So no, I don't think you need learn jQuery to learn JavaScript—it might actually be the opposite: ditching jQuery might be the key to learning JS!
Some websites that have helped me, even though I don't know the jQuery 'way' of doing things, are sites that show how things are done both in jQuery and vanilla JS. Whenever I want to learn how to do something I don't know at all, I check one of these sites and learn the vanilla JS way:
Good luck! I've been on my learning journey for 4 years now and it's like a whole new world has opened up. I'm super excited for your journey and wish you all the best.