It feels to me like most websites out there could run on way less hardware, if only people would embrace a few things.

#1 Minimalism. You don't need 400 KB of JS to display some mostly text content to your users with some interactivity sprinkled in.

You don't need to reinvent office software, or very rich text editors in browsers, stop using the web as a universal delivery platform/mechanism, because that's not what it was meant for. When browsers will ship integrated dependencies so that even CDNs don't need to be hit (like versions of jQuery, Bootstrap and numerous JS frameworks as well as WASM code like Blazor which contains a .NET runtime), then you'll be able to do that, but arguably that will never happen.

Use the web as a platform for displaying primarily text content with the occasional images, forms and a little bit of interactivity sprinkled in. Most sites out there simply aren't and shouldn't be like this (that said, when you have exceptional reasons for throwing aside that suggestion, do so): https://geargenerator.com

#2 Static content. You don't need to use Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla or many of the other CMSes out there, since they can get really heavyweight with numerous plugins and are not only a security challenge, but are also problematic from a performance perspective.

Consider using static site generators instead. When reading an article of yours, the DB shouldn't even be hit, since most of the article contents are unlikely to change often, so you should be able to pre-render each of the article versions as a set of static HTML and use the common JS/CSS that you already have for the rest of the articles. Furthermore, it's easy to just jump into CMSes and introduce ungodly amounts of complexity, all of which cause your back end to process bunches of code for each request. Static files don't have that drawback.

#3 Caching. Know when and what to cache, and how. Images, JS files, CSS files and even entire HTML pages should be cache friendly. Know which ones aren't, make exceptions for those and cache everything else.

Not only is it not necessary to hit the DB for many of the pages in your site at all, but also sometimes you shouldn't even hit the back end either. The most popular pages of your site should just live in a cache somewhere, be it within your web servers or a separate solution, so that they can be returned instantly. HTML is good for this, use it.

Furthermore, know what cache policies to use. Sometimes even the cache resources shouldn't be redownloaded, if the user already has these resources loaded from a different page. Use bundle splitting responsibly, extract common functionality in easily cacheable bundles and set the appropriate headers.

And yet, i've seen a surprising amount of ignorance in regards to caching, static site generation and even how large webpages have gotten: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

I don't claim to know it all, but working towards the goal of efficiently using pages should definitely be viewed as an important one: be it because you want to pay less for your infrastructure, or care about the environment, or even just want to manage fewer nodes.

Instead, nowadays far too many orgs just try to be the first to market and ignore the engineering based approach to ensuring that the solutions are not only functional but also sustainable. That saddens me.