What version of Rails are you using? I think the Stimulus route is the right path. Vue is acceptable as well, but Stimulus is a lot more light weight. You can definitely use Stimulus without jQuery. If you are using other JS libraries which require jQuery, you can still pull it into your project, but just write your application's JS without it. If jQuery is being added into your Rails application as a dependency for another library, I think that's fine, but just avoid using jQuery directly as it would then become a dependency of your application as well as the library.