Web pages are in fact that bad. Testing just now:

* https://www.cnn.com/ is 1.3MB of data.

* https://www.nytimes.com. is 5MB of data.

* https://www.reddit.com/ is 6MB of data.

* https://www.google.com/ is 400KB of data.

* https://www.facebook.com/ (not logged in) is 2MB of data

* https://twitter.com/home/ is 1-3MB of data depending on the ads it decides to show.

Those are all on-the-wire sizes, so after gzip compression and whatnot.

You've picked some very heavy websites, and only two (or three, depending on Twitter) of your six examples are over the 2.6Mb threshold, but fair enough. Popular sites tend to be full of images, and images are usually quite big.

However, this is good, because those are great examples of how browser lazy loading is going to help. When I loaded Reddit it pulled down 7Mb of data, but more than 5Mb was images. Looking at the content above the fold my browser downloaded about 4.5Mb that it doesn't need until I scroll. This change to the HTML spec will get all those sites first load below the average size of a Kindle book. Awesome.

All the examples are indeed over 2.6Mb as that's only 325kB. You probably mean 2.6MB instead but since you're using Mb consistently and the discussion is about transfer sizes I'm not sure.

If you felt mistreated I'm sorry. But it was a genuine question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology#Ifpology ;)

My Kindle books download in a few seconds. And then they are loaded completely and I can jump around in them rather well now. Properly linked books even let me jump from exercises to answers and back rapidly.

And there is some irony that I am likely tracked heavily on what I've read. Certainly on what I note. So it isn't like I'm clamoring for no scripts. Just find it odd that the push for web applications has destroyed the use of web pages.

Websites make gazillion requests and run a bunch of javascript that is in their (not necessarily your) interest. Download size is not the only driver for slowness.

The majority of those requests aren't blocking though, and nor is the JS code when it's parsed and run, so it won't have much of an impact on the parent's perception of how long it takes to load a page. There will be exceptions on sites that have been poorly made but those are unusual these days. If you sit with devtool's Network tab open you'll see a ton of stuff going on, but most of the bad stuff is after the page has rendered and become interactive.

Web apps are a different story because they often load a couple of meg of JS before anything happens, but so long as things are being cached correctly that's only a problem occasionally.