I've found this answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/50431015/11735826 and i wonder why .$el was used here, and also why does it not work without the el element?
2 Answers
when you use ref attribute on the html tag, the DOM-element is returned by this.$refs.modal.
when you use ref attribute on the template tag, the component instance is returned, so this.$refs.modal.$el returns directly the DOM element. See https://v2.vuejs.org/v2/api/#vm-el
$el returns the HTML element to which a given Vue instance (be it a main instance or a component) is bound. By using this.$refs.modal.$el the answer gets the underlying HTML element for the this.$refs.modal, and then encapsulates it in a jQuery object to call the modal method.
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