Found another two VTE based terminals that look interesting:

   -- lwt  [1].   This is pretty much the most minimal terminal you can
      build with VTE.

   -- taterm [2].  It's very  similar  to  my  own  terminal  emulator,
      xiate,  because there's just one running instance of the program.
      It appears to be using dbus behind the scenes.  It's more minimal
      than  xiate,  though,  because it doesn't accept any command line
      arguments. This means you can't do a "taterm -e foo".

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 1. https://github.com/mewkiz/lwt

 2. https://github.com/t-8ch/taterm