I* rewrote my jQuery autocomplete plugin as a...

Back in 2016, I published Flexdatalist — a jQuery plugin for autocomplete/datalist inputs. It quietly grew to 364 stars and 81 forks on GitHub, people, myself included, have been using it in production ever since. But jQuery in 2026? It was time for a rewrite. The problem The original plugin did a lot: remote and static data, multiple tags, result grouping, keyboard navigation, localStorage caching. It worked well, but it was ~2000 lines of jQuery spaghetti that I wrote when I was a less experie