My guess is that the MVL for Javascript + jQuery would be about 10% the size of the L.
It would have saved me years of learning and practice time if Javascript + jQuery had an MVL, and I had access to it.
The problem with the MVL approach is that ultimately people pay us to solve their problems, and don't care how complicated it makes our lives. That complexity has to go somewhere, and usually the best place for it is in the code, else you're just doing your customer's problem manually. Eventually people realize that they're writing the same code over and over again, and that they could save a lot of time as programmers if those features were just built into the language.
I'd really encourage you to study Scheme and write a few programs in it. It's famous for being the language where you can implement all the other language features in it. So for example, it's pretty common to implement your own object system in it; your programs won't be compatible with libraries that use any other object systems (which is a major reason why it's not used industrially), but you can play around with classical inheritance, prototypes, access control, multimethods, virtual dispatch, and so on all within the language. Similarly, promises, async, green threads, collections, list comprehensions, type systems, and many other language features can all be done as libraries, using the basic features of closures, continuations, macros, cons cells, and arrays. Even things like if-statements, exceptions, and loops don't need special language features, although they're standardized across implementations.
OP is referring to 'get started' documentation, not to the language itself being minimal-size.
* data definitions for lists and key/value pairs, and how to nest them, change them, access them
* function and anonymous function definitions
* map, filter, reduce/fold over lists and key/value pairs
* api to communicate with world that uses tasks/promises
This way, my code looks familiar and similar regardless if I write it in C#, Javascript, Java, or Clojure.
Main drawback is, that this limits my comfort zone to languages that have at least lambdas and closures.