I'm puzzled why the author highlights "Lightweight: no dependencies" as a strength - in node.js land this is not the case in my opinion. I'm happy to hear people's view on this
Also i haven't tried it for a long shot for example to make it work more than millions of webpages, but "memory leak free" is a really strong claim which has to be tested first.
Not sure what you are wanting to be taken out?
Also, it does have dependencies (check package.json); you just took a quote out of its context.
Also I might be coloured by some folks avoiding dependencies like the plague ;) I usually prefer small modules coupled with other small modules as the result usually means more tested code (when related to node.js that is).
I can't speak on the performance difference between libxml and cheerio, but jsdom seems to be way slower than cheerio. So maybe that's what he means with lightweight.