"Text is small" so a website should be extremely light in resources is a really simplistic way to go about things.
Most web pages are not hand crafted page by page, they're part of a CMS with a million other capabilities. Or, the team creating the website was under cost pressure and went for some performance-compromised "good enough" solution. Or, the website is old (true for almost all of them) and no longer under serious active maintenance.
It's not just incompetence leading to technical bloat.
The same is true for some of the "dark patterns" like auto-playing videos and pop-ups. We should stop with the narrative that this is due to publication truly hating users or being completely tone-deaf. It's purposefully done because it works. It serves marketing and monetary goals.
Yes, this comes at the expense of usability. You should see it as an act of desperation that is existential. It keeps the lights on. The terrible state of web usability is due to it not having any reliable business model other than the current status quo.
A CMS, fundamentally, is a server application that pulls things out of the database, puts them into templates, and spits the resulting HTML out to the browser. There is no inherent reason why a page that comes out of a feature-rich CMS has to be bloated.
Under that definition of a CMS I agree, however I think what you are describing is an MVP of a CMS that would require additional features and (likely) bloat to truly be useful to most publications.
Examples:
Social Media integrations
Subscriptions integration
Advertisements + trackers (which will likely pull in additional garbage)
Analytics (GA, etc.)
Comment section + moderation tools
Media: images, videos
Font(s)
Responsiveness
It CAN all add up fast unless someone is keeping track and responsible for keeping these sites lean.
Not necessarily the weight, but lots of other attributes of cars and other factory-made products are the way they are just because of the process in the factory. Sometimes to make production itself cheaper (not just material cost, but process-wise), sometimes to make it more efficient and sometimes just because automating it fully with good results is impossible, compared to making it by hand.
>Not necessarily the weight, but lots of other attributes of cars and other factory-made products are the way they are just because of the process in the factory.
Well, the magic of the digital realm is that the process doesn't dictate much, if anything at all, regarding the end result of a CMS.
My electric kettle recently broke. When I got into the guts of it, I noticed there were a lot of weird components that weren't really used, or didn't seem that useful. When I searched youtube for help, I found out those components were for kettles with a physical on/off switch. Mine didn't have the switch, but everything else on the inside was still there.
Most web pages are not hand crafted page by page, they're part of a CMS with a million other capabilities. Or, the team creating the website was under cost pressure and went for some performance-compromised "good enough" solution. Or, the website is old (true for almost all of them) and no longer under serious active maintenance.
It's not just incompetence leading to technical bloat.
The same is true for some of the "dark patterns" like auto-playing videos and pop-ups. We should stop with the narrative that this is due to publication truly hating users or being completely tone-deaf. It's purposefully done because it works. It serves marketing and monetary goals.
Yes, this comes at the expense of usability. You should see it as an act of desperation that is existential. It keeps the lights on. The terrible state of web usability is due to it not having any reliable business model other than the current status quo.