[Cthulhu_]

this is true, but it's because developers, designers and marketeers add loads of stuff onto it. Pages that show animated ads, CSS animations and (sometimes multiple) autoplaying videos are slow.

But there's plenty of websites out there still - including HN - that do without all of those extras. And it's up to web developers of today to resist using the fanciest technologies to build websites.

At some point there was the concept of (iirc) progressive web apps, where the basis was all HTML - fully functional, you could turn off JS and CSS and it'd still work - and then use CSS and JS to add functionality on top, but that would be purely embellishment.