The Russian novel comparison is indeed completely unfair. If Crime and Punishment was served by today's web publisher, the contextual ads for money lenders, lawyers, adult services and what-not would of course inflate the size of the page to hundreds of megabytes, significantly exceeding the size of the tiny pages shamed by the unfair comparison!
To his credit, he did make the point of most images and videos being superfluous in most pages, and of them wasting battery and bandwidth, even if they do so after the text was rendered.
I have no idea what your point is. If Crime and Punishment was illustrated, then it would take way more space. A single picture might take up more space than the entire book. It's just the reality digital images. And if you don't want images, well then you don't have to wait until they download.
He does make the point that most images are unnecessary. But then he puts dozens of unnecessary images into his web page! Even he doesn't follow that advice.
To his credit, he did make the point of most images and videos being superfluous in most pages, and of them wasting battery and bandwidth, even if they do so after the text was rendered.