[fabiospampinato]

I'm not sure I buy this argument, one can't just say that ~30kb isn't a lot because 30 is a number perceived as low, would 30kb be justified for a library that allows you to toggle a class on a node? Of course it wouldn't, you need to measure what you are getting for 30kb.

I don't buy the second part of the argument either, you can load a 1000kb image on a blog post and that won't have nearly the same effect as loading 1000kb of JS. The JS needs to be parsed and executed and maybe the site doesn't even work without it, the image can probably be rendered progressively, can be decoded in another thread, nothing is really waiting on it to load, and if it doesn't load at all it's not the end of the world anyway.

With ~4kb you can have Preact, is jQuery Slim (~26kb) giving you ~6.5x times as much value as Preact really? Maybe it is, probably not.

For some context I maintain a ~6kb rewrite of a subset of jQuery (https://github.com/fabiospampinato/cash), which IMO is much better value proposition for many use cases.

[simondotau]

I get this, but my website is 150kb on first load with a stale cache, most of which is a ~50kb JS blob, ~10kb CSS blob and ~80kb of fonts. All these static resources are served from the cloud edge with Cloudflare and aggressively cached in the browser. (All quantities gzipped.) Subsequent pages are typically less than 10kb and are served from a geographic location near to 80% of my country-specific audience.

The reality is my site (a discussion forum) has a substantially smaller footprint than just about any other similar site, let alone most Wordpress templates.

The size of jQuery is, for me, outstanding value for the efficiencies it gives me. I have not checked out Cash but the main reason I use jQuery is for the ajax scaffolding which most alternatives don't offer.