Yep, backbone was just like 200-300 lines of code. It was incrementally better than JQuery alone but suffered from the same limitations when trying to build apps with lots of views. If you wanted performances, you had a separated creation and update path, and you were back to Jquery spaghetti and tight coupling between DOM and JS via CSS selectors.

Shaming shouldn't be a thing, but It's fair to say no one should start a backbone project in 2017, unless it was dead simple, in which case you can use pretty much any tech anyway.