«The 49MB Web Page» is a great summary of all that's wrong with much of the web along explanations of how we ended up there due to commercial ad incentives.

https://thatshubham.com/blog/news-audit

The 49MB Web Page

A look at modern news websites. How programmatic ad-tech, huge payloads and hostile architecture destroyed the reading experience.

@gedankenstuecke ten years ago, Maciej Ceglowski made a case that loading these sites with mobile data generated more revenue for the cell phone provider than the publisher
@bookandswordblog @gedankenstuecke It's an absolute shame he went into the transphobe hole. His talks on webpage sizes and data privacy were great.
@sparks @gedankenstuecke is that a twitter thing? He seemed to move to twitter and that is like turning into a snake, it feels satisfying in the moment but it never helps. I don't know what he posts there.
@gedankenstuecke I wonder if that has anything to do with search engines being broken and companies no longer optimizing their websites for Google. Many sure weren't doing it for their users.
@gedankenstuecke
That page is more than twice the size of my entire site.  
@mplouffe yeah, the whole git repo of my uncompiled Jekyll Page before any optimizing is <70 mb, including some quite large images that I should shrink some 😅
@gedankenstuecke The patterns describe here reminds me of a thing I desperately want: a standardized browser "Rage Quit" button.

If you click that, it notifies the site ( sends a post to /.well-known/rage-quit perhaps ) before deleting all local cookies, cache, saved data, etc. Make the web master see how many people leave without intent to return after adding that new autoplay video popup that can't be closed.

Maybe even add a user reminder popup before navigating to said site in the future: "You rage-quit on 2026-03-13, continue?"
@gedankenstuecke Omg you should check out the Fandom wiki sites. I left just one tab unattended and my swap was ballooning.