As a predominantly frontend developer, I sometimes (just for giggles) check to see the page load of pages I visit. It always dismays me to see a site's own resources only take 200-500kb of bandwidth... and then all the ads and associated requests take another 25MB. It's quite common and I keep thinking there must be a better way..

Well, there is - but consumers prefer free + ads to micro-payments or subscriptions. Granted there has been pushback recently but that's usually due to gross abuse of ads.

The only realistic way that I see forward are the ad networks (and this includes Google) setting lower maximum payload sizes for ads. Obviously sites can push back on quality and size but it's a hard metric to track consistently given how ad networks serve things.

~~consumers~~ (nay, citizens) prefer to have no ads or subscription costs etc.

The fact is: ad-based model just puts the burden on those most susceptible to advertising. It's similar enough to funding schools through state lotteries in that the money comes from somewhere or the results go underfunded, and if you accept state-run lotteries or anything that looks even slightly like today's ad-based internet, you are talking about a funding source that is deeply and fundamentally unethical.

You say that, but time after time user behavior shows they'll go to the ad supported version.

See also: mobile. You have to totally gameify things to get micropayments to work.

I mean, if you want that for websites, sure... but if you think clickbait is bad now...

"but" is not appropriate. You aren't contradicting anything I said. I'd agree with you completely, but your points are only "and" from my post, not "but".

There are no micro payments out there that would support the site. You'd need to charge something like 0.0005 cents per view. No currency exchange supports something small. In reality, it would make people money. The consumer could limit their account to $20/m.

On the other hand, micropayment would freeze out poor people.

No, poor people would just see ads because they can't pay to remove them. Although I guess that's not a great target market...

It sounds like you use React well and it's reasonably light and performant. The current project I'm on has a React frontend where typing in a text box is laggy due to how horrific the code base is. You're correct in saying that React is not to blame only it's misuse, however it is becoming a common cause of slowness.

If it wasn't React it would be [insert any other framework here]. React isn't the cause - bad developer practice is. As you said - a text box is laggy due to how horrific the code base is.

That's not something that is going to be fixed by changing library.