it falls within TACE
Does it? Most jQuery is served minified. Even if not, the "full fat" version is not especially readable.
There are bad reasons to despise jQuery (e.g. because it's old). But there are good reasons, too (because it's bloated and just not very good).
just include jQuery from a CDN
jQuery is, last I checked, over 200k unminified.
could a few carefully-placed lines of jQuery
Look, jQuery is not lightweight.* It's how we got into this mess.
* Does it require half a gigabyte of dev dependencies and regular dependencies to create a Hello, World application? No, but it's still not lightweight.
your 40-pound jQuery file and 83 polyfills
only jquery
It would be nice if people would stop saying this—and saying it like this—as if it's a badge of honor. jQuery is a fuckin' beast. 10 years ago, the reason that the browser was being brought to a crawl on any given pages often came down to the fact that it was using jQuery. jQuery is the reason that bloated frameworks became normalized and brought us to where we are today. So, enough already with this just-a-little-jQuery stuff.