This is a bit disingenuous without actual numbers: jQuery minified is 83 KiB, 30 KiB transferred with gzip. The new slim version knocks that down to 70 and 24 KiB, respectively.

For almost any website that has actual use-cases for it, it's not going to be the data bottleneck. Plus most websites have way more severe bloat elsewhere to worry about

Your users likely already have jQuery in their browser cache, given it's loaded from one of the public CDNs.

Which version and which CDN? Assuming the user's cache for a non-archival product sounds dubious.

There are only a handful of major CDNs, and jQuery has been at the same version for a very long time.

This gets posted a lot but there are so many versions of jquery on so many different cdns that very rarely is it the case. I saw some research on it and it was in the single digit percentage of times.