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The article is talking more about the execution time to read, parse, and execute the library -- that isn't cached at all.

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Seems like the writer hasn't heard about the trick of putting js at the bottom of the page, or the async html5 tag. Looks like the had jquery in the head section on every page. That's not really jquery or javascript's fault.

The writers are Matt Hobbs and Andy Sellick, respectively Head of Frontend Development and Senior Frontend Developers at GDS. They may have considered alternative options.

Here's a previous article explaining why they did what they did:

https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2022/08/11/how-and-why-we-re...

That article doesn't address the point raised: their placement of jquery in the head of page was likely the cause of the performance issues more than the presence of jquery.

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