“One of the downsides is that the plugin relies on jQuery. The plugin’s code has a small footprint, but jQuery has grown into a bit of a beast over the years and is becoming less and less relevant with more recent features of modern JavaScript. For many WordPress sites, this may be a non-issue because their theme or some other plugin is already loading the jQuery library.”

This is a major chicken-egg problem in the Wordpress ecosystem, especially once the SEO penalties for poor Core Web Vitals scores start to kick in. There needs to be a push for plugins/blocks to stop depending on it, especially for relatively simple functionality like form validation.