FWIW, the linked site is built with a 300 line custom build script, Rollup, Buble & Terser - even the dev dependencies are extremely minimal. no, it doesnt have the latest HMR hotness, so the DX could be a bit better if i wanted more bloat.
it's like 1/10th the size, api-compatible and well-architectured.
Out of curiosity, what do you think of Alpine.js and Stimulus.js, which come to mind when I think of smaller utility libraries for adding "sprinkles" of JS?
no experience with those, but if you're feeling masochistic, try these:
Without bubbling event handling, it's a no go for handling event on dynamically generated inner content.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/mat...
* in limited cases like tabular data or large lists
HTML + JQuery, which the hydration approach is compared with, is not used for performance reasons per se. It's used because its easier to reason about and the incremental interactivity that something like JQuery brings to HTML is better than writing your entire frontend in React for something as simple as a blog, for example.