If people only wanted 2 kb text pages, it'd be a different story. But rich media is often what people want, so it makes even an information lookup on native Yelp expensive. Once you bring in rich media, 1 MB of JS is very minor, and JS can be used to optimize your rich media downloading.

Sure, but why do I need that crap on pages without rich media? And why do I need to wait for my browser (since it's on a computer other than the latest model iMac) to spend 20 seconds rendering that mess of JavaScript before I can view that content (text OR rich media), when it could display vanilla HTML faster than I can blink?

I'm with you. You'll frequently see news stories with 3-5 MB of junk to augment a < 50 kB piece.That's more information than all of published human writing before 1800. Sorry, but that's stupid, and looks bad. Yes, a good chunk of that is ads, but a lot of it is loading all of two versions of bootstrap so you can use one class and similar silliness.