[favorited]

I've been out of the JS world for a few years, but for a single Ajax call, why wouldn't you use XMLHttpRequest?

[matchagaucho]

jQuery ajax essentially is just a wrapper to XMLHttpRequest.

With some effort, the relevant jQuery methods that act as polyfills could be extracted.

However, a minified version of core jQuery is < 20Kb. A very low technical debt trade-off to support 99% of browsers.