There are lots of other problems piled on web development that is strictly not their fault. The aging network infrastructure hasn't seen updates in sometimes decades, despite billions and billions of tax money poured into it.
You really should be able to get more than 3mbit/s in 2019. Pictures should be allowed to be more than a handful kilobytes in size.
Datacaps are a ginormous moneygrab with no basis on technology. Abolishing corrupt corporate brotherhoods would do much more good than inventing yet another band-aid compression/surveillance point to the mix.
You can't easily improve the latency. My latency to EU is 100 ms, my latency to US is 250 ms, so request-answer is 500 ms. Make two request-answer cycles and that's already 1 second. And TCP already have some cycles. Yes, I have 100 megabits (which is not easy to utilize, because of TCP algorithm), but that does not help. And that's not only about size.
You can make a rich, animated, and engaging website for less than 200kb.
Most devs have big stonking macbook pros, with decent network connections. So having a 4.5 meg wedge of JS is a perfectly acceptable tradeoff.
Much as US infrastructure is crumbling, You can't just say "Nahh, I'm not going to sacrafice my time to make things fast for the end user. I need these 1400 modules and full motion video."
You definitely can, and that is being done at the moment. I'm reasoning that you could be doing so much more with much less effort and cost if you didn't have as stringent requirements. We should progress in all fronts, and not simply pile everything on one.
You really should be able to get more than 3mbit/s in 2019. Pictures should be allowed to be more than a handful kilobytes in size.
Datacaps are a ginormous moneygrab with no basis on technology. Abolishing corrupt corporate brotherhoods would do much more good than inventing yet another band-aid compression/surveillance point to the mix.