I should mention, I did want it to be quick and dirty (it's a prototype), but well, it could have been a bit more concise. Double set parentheses come from the templating system I use BTW, if it wasn't clear.
Being HTML oriented is very cool, and you get a lot of things for free, but I keep saying "oh this would have been much easier with react" a bit too much.
I used Zepto once for a weekend project without jQuery and it did what I needed very well. Though these days I would also check in with e.g. plain JS (way better support than when jQuery started) and projects like htmx at the other end of the "well but I need an app, but want to go light" direction.
For xhr you can use native fetch afaik, the only browser that doesn't have it is good old IE. Basic form validation is baked into html forms. And most of jquery selector stuff is easy to do in vanilla JS.
Any recommendation for a lightweight and complementary JavaScript library? Validate forms, XHR wrapper, etc. without the bulk of jQuery.