Difference being jQuery was well suited and really necessary back in the day. Browser incompatibility meant that pretty much any non-trivial DOM operation needed to be wrapped by jQuery to be done safetly. Now every browser is just chrome except for firefox and firefox and chrome have played nicely standards wise for nearly a decade now.

Vanilla JS being viable on the frontend without jQuery or some wrapper probably didn't happen until HTML 5 so around 2014 by my reckoning.