I will refer you to <a href="https://github.com/jquery/jquery/pull/1165#discussion_r2956240">this</a> discussion.

If we talking about node enviroment with jQuery installed through npm, then it should not be a problem, there are other cases though, but this <code>if</code> is not saving from anything, taking as an example <a href="http://bugs.jquery.com/ticket/13193">case</a> mentioned in discussion – either jQuery will be silent about it's brokenness or it will tell about it right away.