The block of code they injected here was 7.9 KB (3.7 KB gzipped). jQuery is 93 KB (33 KB gzipped). So no, I don't think that would have been more elegant. Injecting anything into users' pages without permission is insane. Injecting a huge library like jQuery would be even more insane.
Wasted resources. The difference in size between the two (using the numbers from the above comment) is 85.1 KB. Now think of all the customers Comcast has and you will see quickly the difference it makes with a few KB.