My last two projects have completely forgone jQuery for vanilla JS and a minimal Lodash. Widespread support for querySelector, querySelectorAll, getElementById eliminate all of those handy selector functions. The rest you can read below.

http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

This also helps you to learn better javascript, rather than relying on a crutch to string together a lot of convoluted sugar syntax.

Ajax is the last thing keeping me in jquery.

https://github.com/github/fetch

Among countless others. Please don't bring in all of jQuery if you're just going to use one function from it.