Honestly, it's... not terrible? It's hackish, sure, but the NSA website's frontend isn't a huge app where good software engineering needs to be practiced - the code does what it needs to do, was likely written quite quickly, and doesn't need the likes of webpack to build.<p>In my core projects I'll use Ember or React+Redux, but where I just need a couple hundred lines of one-off code for e.g. a marketing site... why not some hackish jQuery?