You can't completely remove CUPS on a Linux distribution, because it's a hard dependency for a lot of things. You can disable the Cups daemon from starting though (e.g. systemctl disable cups.service). Depending on your distribution, you may also be able to just have the cups libraries installed for the dependency, and not actually have the cups printing service (daemon) installed.

As for a Cups replacement, it's the standard and sometimes only printing system available on a distribution. Other printing systems tend to plug into Cups (e.g. gutenprint, foomatic). You'd be better off to look for support for your printer model and go from there. I'm sorry, I don't know a lot about printing on Linux.