Check out apostrophe-lean-frontend! An alternative frontend javascript environment for ApostropheCMS, with no vendor libraries (no jQuery, no lodash, etc). Just enough glue to let you write widget players, plus some players for standard widgets which you can opt into… otherwise it doesn’t push them at all.
We’ll be using this on our own new projects, especially those that don’t require schema-driven forms for logged-out users. And, this is how things will look in 3.x. So it’s a good idea to start taking advantage of it.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/apostrophe-lean-frontend
Enjoy!