[seanwilson]

This is like when people complain about legacy code they first see it without understanding the context the code was written in. Or saying C coding is safe if everyone was just more careful and more skilled.

It's just not true that it's super easy to write fast pages. There's a huge amount of background you need to understand to optimize fonts, images, CSS, your server, your CMS, caching, scripts etc. There's multiple approaches for everything with different tradeoffs.

Even if you have the skills to do this solo, you might not have the budget or the time or the approval of management. Big websites also require you to collaborate with different developers with different skillsets with different goals, and you need to keep people in sales, graphic design, SEO, analytics, security etc. roles happy too.