You will probably need jQuery
Lots of those are for Sizzle.<p>jQuery would be great if it broke up all those tiny little and completely orthogonal things it does into modules so that people could use them as needed. No one library is going to provide everything for every project but making everyone require your ajax code when all they wanted was an `offset()` function is equally backwards thinking. We have much better tooling now to work with modules and to reuse code.<p>Arguments about CDN caching are some sort of premature optimization (or I don't know what really). Most early projects don't need it and other projects can trivially use many of the free (or super low cost) CDN providers if they care that much.<p>My issues with jQuery are not at how awesome it has worked in the past or how well it has hidden/handled lots of browser quirks; it is that thinking in terms of "everything is dom manipulation" is the wrong abstraction for doing organized and maintainable front-end code. The things jQuery does well would be useful within smaller components or libaries but now we are back to the original issue of jQuery is one giant blob.