ah, yeah, i don't know what to tell you, i've gone through the code base a bunch and there isn't much i feel like i can take out that would make much of a difference without a major step back in functionality: history support is a big one, input gathering has gotten more complex as i behave the way forms in HTML actually work, i have a lot of events that i fire, there's the queuing behavior of requests, etc.
my understanding from the browser engineers is that javascript files are compiled and kept in a cache for the browser, and i never see compilation or execution times in htmx profiles unless someone is processing a ton of htmx attributes (1000+ row tables w/ loads of hx-* attributes per row) which is an orthogonal problem
end of the day i don't think grinding out another few K on the minified source is gonna make a big diff, although we do plan on doing things like moving to modern closures (i assume gzip nukes most of that advantage, idk)
i think a minimal preact-like htmx might be interesting, not as minimal as htmz, but something close. might be worth looking at if you are interested, the concept isn't hard and w/ different design decisions you could prob keep it really small