Articles like this make me thankful that I've done my 10,000 hours of web development learning the ins and outs of the DOM and it's interactions with JavaScript (mostly topics covered in Crockford's book). Admittedly, about 9,950 of those hours were making it work in IE6.

jQuery is a framework, like many others. Programming is not about learning frameworks, it's about learning the language, it's runtime behaviours and of course software development in general. Frameworks are there to speed up development time.