[KaiserPro]

You can make a rich, animated, and engaging website for less than 200kb.

Most devs have big stonking macbook pros, with decent network connections. So having a 4.5 meg wedge of JS is a perfectly acceptable tradeoff.

Much as US infrastructure is crumbling, You can't just say "Nahh, I'm not going to sacrafice my time to make things fast for the end user. I need these 1400 modules and full motion video."

[Nyandalized]

You definitely can, and that is being done at the moment. I'm reasoning that you could be doing so much more with much less effort and cost if you didn't have as stringent requirements. We should progress in all fronts, and not simply pile everything on one.