Hi @randomorca100, jQuery does nothing by itself. It is very small <80KB. This is negligible compared to the workloads most browsers can handle.
All scripts are cached when they are loaded the first time and they are loaded async i.e it is non-blocking load.
Tools like pagespeed will just give hints. They all load the page from scratch without caching. Just removing jquery will not cause any noticable difference in search traffic or SEO. I would suggest see the difference with and without announcer.
Like I suggested previously, I can merge announcer and jquery into one script so only one script is loaded instead of two scripts.
These scripts are loaded on the header, so it is not possible to conditionally load jquery based on if announcer is shown or not.
Thanks,
Aakash