I'm not going to say there is not a problem with websites being bloated with code that is completely unnecessary in order to track you because that would be like denying the sky is blue. And I'm not color blind.

But comparing the size of a website with an early 90's videogame is a little bit pointless when technology, and specially consumer demands, grow.

Back in the very early 90's DOOM didn't use shaders, neither it required a 1080Ti or a Ryzen to render properly. A 486 with the math coprocessor addon might suffice for that.

But (unfortunately) this is not the 90's anymore and we have more advanced hardware and infrastructures. Try to play the new DOOM with a 486, see what happens. And nobody complains about that!

Websites nowadays weighting 10Mb or more is not that alarming considering that the web is more than 25 years old and that most of the resources (leaving the true bloat away) are high resolution images, videos and even fonts.

@0 If you are talking about jquery, google tag manager, etc, not really. I mean, not by themselves.

jquery minified is about 100KB. If you talk about fonts, like fontawesome, or other libraries that are used for transferring data using ajax or something, I don't know. Maybe. But that's because they transfer that data.

The problem is when you use too many of these in the same site. If each one of your scripts weight around 100KB and you depend on many of these, it's true that your site is going to go around the 2.5MB mark really easily.

One of the most bloated sites I know, which is a national diary, weights only about 5MB, and I tell you this one is bloated to hell with all that stuff. And some of the scripts weight around 100-120KB. In total, all these increase the size way more than it should. Yes, it's bloated. This is real bloat.

So yes, as I said, I can't ignore this problem.

However, blaming JavaScript or the protocol, like most people does, is not the solution.

@0 The problem is that professional web development relies a lot on "templates" and "premade software" like content managers, CDNs with libraries, frameworks, fonts, etc.

This is because companies and people want their sites cheap and we don't want to spend time reinventing the wheel for them. So we do it, or we try to do it, in the easiest and cheapest way possible.

This is when things like bootstrap or jquery (for browser compatibility) come in handy, at the expense of increasing the size of a site.

Add it to the fact that companies are constantly data mining their visitors for maximum profitability and there you have your bloat.