Admittedly, he was refering to the 2.0 line, the goal of which was to drastically lower the size of the codebase by cutting out support for non-current browsers.

Feature bloat is still bloat. jQuery is a DOM library, an XHR library, an animations library, a functional library, a promises library... as far as I know 2.0 doesn't do anything about that issue.

In either 1.9 or 2.0 you have the option to exclude XHR or animations as well as several other functional modules. More feature-lopping capability will be coming soon.