[RussianCow]

> It’s generally more efficient to have one GET request that can be heavily optimized than a lot of tiny XMLHttpRequest that need to be parsed separately.

Without context, this statement is misleading at best and downright false at worst. You’re right that splitting up a single request into multiple would incur a small performance penalty, but you also generally gain other advantages like more localized caching and the ability to conditionally skip requests. In the long run, those advantages may actually make your app significantly more efficient. But without discussing details like this, it’s pointless to make wild assumptions about performance.

[Retric]

The context was JS bloat, so we are specifically talking about the subset of poorly written sites. When it’s possible to shoot yourself in the foot many people will do so.

That said, if you ever actually profile things you will find the overhead per request is actually quite high. There is a clear tendency to request far to little data at a time.