I agree! That's kinda the point with Datastar. EVERYTHING is a plugin, the core is a < 300 LOC engine for parsing data-* attributes and making available to plugins. You can pick and choose what makes sense for you. If you want to have declarative spec compliant interfaces, it can't get any smaller from what I've seen in the wild. Happy to get help to shrink it even more!
My fork: https://github.com/midzer/azimuth/tree/emscripten