I see his point and I think another dimension of the tooling is a root cause too...

> Recently I needed a library to build query strings, just a small one so that I wouldn’t have to include jQuery just for that. After a couple of hours of research...

jQuery clearly is the best library to look to for a mature implementation. So why not just use it? Hours looking for alternatives is actually really expensive.

The justification is that jQuery is too big.

First It's probably not too big. CDNs and browser caching exist to optimize the problem upstream.

Next, the dynamic nature of JavaScript is to blame. You can't easily extract and compile just the functions you need.

Ideally we could all leverage bits of jQuery instead of poorly rewriting parts of it in the name of minimalism.