To my knowledge, Cheerio (which is great) does not depend on jQuery. I believe it just implements a limited selector, traversal, and manipulation API that's very similar to a subset of jQuery's API over the browser DOM.
Exactly "Cheerio implements a subset of core jQuery" it does not depend directly on jQuery as a dependency but it does use it.
Not sure I understand what that has to do with jQuery being on npm. The only way that Cheerio uses jQuery is by choosing its popular API to implement an interface to scraped pages in.