Well, it depends on use cases. If you're optimizing your site for fast initial loads on poor mobile connections, for example, then kilobytes matter. If you find smaller replacements for more than one library, you could end up saving a megabyte. So it's good to have small libraries.
Of course it depends on use cases, but overall there is not much of a point to break up one library into "dozens" of smaller ones, if their eventual total then, in the best case, saves only <10kb or maybe even exceeds the size of the initial one library.
All these jQuery alternatives are nice and such but are not actually bringing much to the table. Yes with each of them you save a few kilobytes but also lose a lot of features. In that case you can go native straight away (querySelectorAll) and save any download in the first place.
And, mobile connections are not that poor anymore as well. Certainly also depends on the region in the world but overall they are getting closer to fixed one every year.
But yes, eventually it depends on the use case and I am sure there are cases where a trimmed down library might be useful. They wont be the common ones though
They're getting better in the normal cases, but they're still relatively unreliable. Plus with roaming charges, code bloat incurs costs for users.
Just a random example: my band's rehearsal space is under ground and has very poor connectivity. Sometimes I still want to look something up down there. In that situation, I really appreciate websites that download minimal amounts of code.
And I think lots of people have equivalent situations, whether it's their country house, their month in rural Thailand, their sailboat, prison, the wifi on the night bus between Cluj-Napoca and Budapest, etc etc etc.
Since I've been annoyed by heavy websites so many times, often in precious or precarious situations, I have a principle of caring about every kilobyte (and caring about offline functionality, too).
As for whether using this library just means you need to import more libraries to cover for jQuery's other features, that's an empirical question that also depends on use case.
