jQuery is quite large (https://bundlephobia.com/package/jquery@3.6.4) compared to Mithril itself (https://bundlephobia.com/package/mithril@2.2.10) and is not widely used in Flarum's frontend.
Many jQuery's features are not used very often since we have Mithril.
Also, Mithril itself requires at least IE11, making most of jQuery's compatibility code completely a waste.
So, I suggest we can replace jQuery with cash-dom (a much smaller alternative, https://bundlephobia.com/package/cash-dom@8.1.5), or just remove it if possible.
I can work on this if you think it's good to go.