  (Abridged) The presence of short-period (< 10 days) planets around main
sequence (MS) stars has been associated either with the dust-destruction region
or with the magnetospheric gas-truncation radius in the protoplanetary disks
that surround them during the pre-MS phase. However, previous analyses have
only considered low-mass FGK stars, making it difficult to disentangle the two
scenarios. This exploratory study is aimed at testing whether it is the inner
dust or gas disk driving the location of short-period, giant planets. By
combining TESS and Gaia DR3 data, we identified a sample of 47
intermediate-mass (1.5-3 M$_{\odot}$) MS stars hosting confirmed and firm
candidate hot Jupiters. We compared their orbits with the rough position of the
inner dust and gas disks, which are well separated around their Herbig stars
precursors. We also made a comparison with the orbits of confirmed hot Jupiters
around a similarly extracted TESS/Gaia sample of low-mass sources (0.5-1.5
M$_{\odot}$). Our results suggest that the inner gas (and not the dust) disk
limits the innermost orbits of hot Jupiters around intermediate-mass stars.
These findings also provide tentative support to previous works that have
claimed this is indeed the case for low-mass sources. We propose that hot
Jupiters could be explained via a combination of the core-accretion paradigm
and migration up to the gas-truncation radius, which may be responsible for
halting inward migration regardless of the stellar mass regime. Larger samples
of intermediate-mass stars with hot Jupiters are necessary to confirm our
hypothesis, which implies that massive Herbig stars without magnetospheres (>
3-4 M$_{\odot}$) may be the most efficient in swallowing their newborn planets.
