[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.