Interesting project. I wonder if you might be willing to outline a few use cases?
Note: this is definitely not the same as a recycled view. But can help accomplish one aspect
Echo.js (https://github.com/toddmotto/echo) is another small no-dependency library (1.89 KB minified), which detects elements appearing on screen, and goes a step further to swap the "src" attribute with a placeholder for lazy loading and unloading.
Disclosure: I've submitted a pull request to it.