Do modern web crawlers use the click event or navigate directly to href on anchor tags?

I'm building a web site that I want to behave fancy-like for users, but want web crawlers to still be able to navigate properly.

I have the following anchor tag:

<a class="overrideClick" href="/projects">Projects</a>

With the following jQuery:

$(document).on('click', '.overrideClick', function(e) { 
    e.preventDefault(); 
    ( ... ) 
});

Will this kill SEO or can I expect Google/Bing/etc to act as I'm hoping and follow to /projects? I would assume they've historically just used the href value, but I know Google is evaluating some JavaScript now.

I know I could just not-include the js for crawler clients but it'd be interesting to know. For science...