Was the role more biased to front end development? Speaking as someone who has been on the other side of the interviewing table, you won't believe the number of people who can use jQuery but are otherwise unfamiliar with vanilla Javascript. I suspect the question itself could have been solved by via plain JS, and you did the equivalent of $('#id') instead of document.getElementByID('id')
These were Rails positions, which in my experience almost always equates to the same skillset expectations as a front-end engineer.
While knowing how to use vanilla js is important, nobody uses getElementByID anymore, unless you're doing something very, very simple (or building a library yourself)
These interviews usually end and then when I look up the company 3 months later they don't exist anymore or have pivoted.
angular.forEach([1,2,3] ...
$.each([ 1, 2, 3 ], ...
[1,2,3].forEach(...
This isn't to say your experience didn't happen, I'm just pointing out that there is a lot more that goes into it than just which framework the cool kids are using nowadays.
Sorry, what does this even mean? When we consider it bad to use an external solution we call it Introducing Unnecessary Dependencies, when we consider it good to use an external solution we call it Not Reinventing The Wheel.
What you're doing here is fetishizing some arbitrary knowledge that you've set up as a litmus test. I've hired probably close to a hundred engineers by this point in my career, and I have to say, unless you are hiring for specialists to fill a very specific purpose, the only test that matters is Joel Spolsky's smart-and-gets-things-done test. There are plenty of web developers out there who only ever used jQuery and thus never learned javascript properly—that says nothing about their talent. There is a good portion of them who, upon being told, "we don't use jQuery here, just raw javascript" will learn and be better at it than you in a couple months. Even more importantly, any good engineer is going to have a lot experience which you don't have, and which to you is an unknown unknown. The best team is made up of diverse backgrounds and experience, not a bunch of people who managed to pass through a series of arbitrary knowledge gates.
It seems like you're presuming that they must lack proficiency in the DOM if they're choosing to use jQuery. Perhaps you're trying to say you want to see them demonstrate that they're not just copy/paste coders.
Given your code example above, I wouldn't want a candidate to know the difference between each `forEach` method, but I would expect them to know that each provides a means of iterating over a set of values.
for(let thing of things) {...}
The appropriate response is "Yeah, your problem seems simple enough. jQuery should do just fine."
But that article would be boring and not on the front page of HN.
I've been told that within the last month, almost in those exact words, here on HN.
I asked what one should use instead and the answer was React. It felt like one of those "no one goes there anymore, it's too crowded" kind of moments.
I'm really not well versed in any of these technologies (but came up with a fun personal project that might end up using them) so I'm assuming that using both together is tame, and that the venn diagram for the two projects doesn't overlap too much.
It's fine if it's a single-person's decision. If two or more people are involved in any sort of standardization process, you're going to go back and forth until you land on the most complicated possible approach like in the article.