Function of と in Xと人気になる

Question

青森県鰺ヶ沢町の店にいる雄の犬の「わさお」は、１０年前にインターネットで紹介されて、ライオンのように長い毛と小さな目がかわいいと人気になりました。
Wasao, a male dog in a shop in xxx was shown on the internet ten years ago and, with cute lion-like fur and small eyes, became popular.

I can't work out the grammatical function of と (in bold) in this sentence. The only と I know that can come after an i-adjective is either the conditional or the quotative. The conditional certainly doesn't make sense to me.

My only guess is that this is quotative with a missing verb. I was thinking maybe I could insert 思われて after と. But I fear I may be way off here.

Answer 1

It literally means people praised it, saying (/thinking that) its long (lion-like) fur and small eyes were cute. In this context と simply indicates that whatever precedes it is the words of a specific person, an opinion of some people in general, etc. So yes, you could think of it as a 'quotation particle'.

Another example of how you could use it is 「簡単にはやられまいと、決死の覚悟で応戦する」. It's used as if the 「簡単にはやられまい」was a quote, even though it might actually only indicate a person's thoughts, beliefs, or something to that effect.