FWIW, I definitely agree that this is mostly a non-event for small apps. I work on a large, actively developed web application, where the lack of strong actively maintained supporting libraries for things like form validation, rich tables, and other use cases is painful, especially since there were great projects for those use cases that are no longer actively maintained.
Instead of using Backgrid and backbone-validation or alternatives, we've been left creating an in house "tables" approach, and maintaining our own fork of backbone-validation. Neither of those things scale well.
The approach of a small core library with other libraries filling gaps as needed only works when there are good libraries that work well with the small core library :/ For some things its easy to take a "VanillaJS" library and make it work, but for others it really helps to have tight library integration.
Instead of using Backgrid and backbone-validation or alternatives, we've been left creating an in house "tables" approach, and maintaining our own fork of backbone-validation. Neither of those things scale well.
The approach of a small core library with other libraries filling gaps as needed only works when there are good libraries that work well with the small core library :/ For some things its easy to take a "VanillaJS" library and make it work, but for others it really helps to have tight library integration.