I have to admit, I hadn’t realized it had got this bad. How did this get normalized?

I browse with most scripts disabled, and have since JS was first introduced to the browser. What I’ve observed is that some pages contain NO actual content, or just the first paragraph, when I load them. I read what’s provided and move on. If the site is hostile to me reading their content they worked so hard to get in front of me, I’m not going to do any extra work to find out what it is.

It is mostly because the bar is measured in time to display content (forgot the name of the metric)

So the huge about of bullshit gets hidden by fast internet and asynchronous jobs.