Of course jQuery is bloated, but of course jQuery would be bloated by this time. The only way to have avoided that would have been to split out the compatibility layer and let people just load whatever portion of it they want. Then you'd have people complaining that when they load enough to support ie8 it seems bloated. b^) Also that architecture probably would have been an ongoing annoyance for jQuery maintenance. (EDIT: yes I know about v2, I'm just saying that what jQuery would become was pretty much decided, architecturally, long before that release.)

It isn't clear that node had to go that direction, or even that they can't change course now.