This is all wrong.

1) You made PR against master branch, which do not have support for oldIE
2) If some node has a <code>textContent.length === 0</code>, this code will choose <code>append</code> path, which is incorrect
3) <code>jQuery#text</code> should work on all set of elements in the stack, with this change, in most cases, it will work only on the first element

I would suggest to fix all that, also open another PR against <code>1.x-master</code> and add tests for two items mentioned above. If you do that, we could land this.