Yeah, I remember Zepto from when it first came out, I want to say like 9kb?

My major concern then was, as I remember, it also used `$`, and that could be confusing to other developers.

But could be a good middle-ground.

Too bad jQuery doesn’t offer a build where you could select what “modules” you need, like most frameworks do…

This seems like a clunky attempt:
https://www.telerik.com/blogs/jquery-using-only-what-you-need