I'm both lucky and unlucky to have used dial-up for a significant period of time. Unlucky because there has always been content that made my modem cry. Lucky because I know first hand what it's like to have a shitty connection and remember the experience vividly.

There's always Some Asshole that demands a website be some all-singing all-dancing multimedia clusterfuck. That's a problem as old as the web. In 1996 it was a single giant gif with an client side image map or worse, the instrument of Beelzebub, the server side image map. Just like today until that giant image downloaded there was no good way to navigate the page.

So web bloat has always been a problem. However I think the problem is worse today than it's been in the past. In the 90s there were fewer connection "classes": dial-up, ISDN, and fast enough not to matter. A vast majority of end users were on dial-up so the pain of web bloat was pretty egalitarian. Device capability also had a narrow range. The capabilities of the crappiest machine able to run a graphical web browser wasn't too far below a top of the line consumer system.

Today there's a far wider range of connection classes and device capabilities. Any given end user might even use different connections and devices in the same day. There's still some dial-up users, broadband ranges from terrible to fantastic, and cellular connections can go from great to terrible by moving between rooms. The capability delta between consumer devices has a huge range in some areas. A bottom tier Android phone or Netbook is vastly inferior to a flagship phone or high end computer.

While even the crappiest devices today are orders of magnitude faster than devices from twenty five years ago, web bloat severely taxes their resources. Even high end devices on a shitty connection have issues with bloat. If a web page is unusable until a 5MB JavaScript payload is received your iPhone 12 can't do shit with that page when you're in some area with spotty 4G and no WiFi.

Besides the Some Assholes making stupid demands about page content, I think there's a whole cohort of web developers that have been a bit spoiled with always connected high bandwidth connections and powerful development machines. Technological progress is cool but now there's even senior web devs that have never known the pain of dial-up or 2G. Even if their media isn't stupid large there's a whole design paradigm of the client pulling in disparate resources and rendering a page all client-side. This is very much informed by thinking a network connection is always on, always reliable, and always low latency.

There's only so much you can do about demands from Some Asshole but designs that simply don't work without JavaScript or work poorly in bad network conditions really frustrate me. It's entirely possible to load content without JavaScript, browsers are really fucking good at it now. Building a usually page without images or video being loaded is also entirely possible.

While I don't think the world needs to go back to console browsers, unless your site needs some multimedia capability (YouTube, Imgur, etc) it should at least be viewable in lynx. If lynx can view it so can the world's microbrowsers, web spiders, and screen readers.

I shouldn't have to download the equivalent of ten copies of Doom to read a fucking blog or newspaper article.