This blog page, ostensibly just text and images, made 30 requests for javascript files, and several more to analytics. In all, it made 62 requests over 50 seconds, transferring 1.9Mb - for less than a thousand words of content. Why?
Because it is 1000 words of content with the ability for you to comment on the content, click one of many numerous react options, retweet it, bookmark it, see how long it will take you to read, view other posts with the same tags, for the developer to know who visited, where they visited from, what time they visited, and where else on the site they went and be all presumably configurable as it is not a website the developer made, but built with a blogging platform.
It is a full fledged web app because it is a web app for managing thousands of different blogs and doing dozens of little random features, each of which has their own little bit of JS.
It seems to me you have just awoken from 20 year of coma.
Welcome to 2020. A lot has changed. People still use phones to access Internet but not exactly the same way (you may want to get updated on this in the closest Apple store. No, not a store with apples either). Oh, and please, were a mask.
The page loaded instantaneously on my 1Gbps link. My phone on 4G loaded it fine too.
It is also very much possible that Internet Explorer 3 is not supported either.
Yes, this is a rant in reply to yours because some people have better things to do than to analyze DevTools outputs to say the 12654 bytes were loaded instead of 12341 over 50 calls instead of 27.
I am personally very, very found of the philosophy of https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and truly believe that this is how web sites with information should look like. But the ones that are readable on my devices are great too. And I do not give a shit about the volume because I do not have to.
And yes, this is horribly annoying to those who have 120x50 displays over a 6kbps link with 1 MB of capping.
Except, you don't need to look at DevTools. As I've mentioned in response to a sibling comment, Wordpress has existed for ages, can be themed as you want, has comments and powerful analytics, and delivers 3.5x the content in half as much bandwidth and requests at one fifth the time required. And of course, it'll be readable on whatever device you have, with or without snarky hyperbole.
Certainly, but so what? The site loads perfectly on my devices so I am happy. It probably loads the same on many other evergreen-ish devices with a decent bandwidth available.
Like I said - I like minimal web sites but the ones that works are fine as well. This one works, I would have never wondered about the weight without your comment.
If a site starts to load slowly or is not readable, I will just skip it.
The only reason I found out was because I'd done that: I've set uBlock to block JS by default, only turning it on for websites that don't work without JS at all. I've gotten used to seeing the purple sign with 10 or 20 blocked requests, but seeing that number hit 30 for a simple blog was... shocking.