Right but other websites load bloat in the sense that it's all trackers, ads and other useless crap that doesn't add anything to the UX. Gmail on the other hand all, if not most, of what is being downloaded is to have the rich UI that it gives. It's mostly not ads, and likely only GA or whatever they use internally as a tracker. I doubt those add up to more than a couple of MB.

Other websites use many different third parties. I've seen some sites use over 10 different analytics tools on top of other other ad networks.

A significant portion of those requests are multiple trackers on multiple domains.

Gmail is an application, not a web page. The distinction isn't a technical one, but based on how users interact with it.

It's still fair to complain about bloat and performance issues, but users generally load Gmail once per browser session, making a large, slow load more excusable than it is for say, CNN.

Unless you're using an incorrect definition of application, then CNN is also an application. Arguably with far more functionality.

The old version of Gmail had 90% of the features and was at least 3x faster and more responsive.

If you load the new Gmail, immediately click the search when it's available and start typing it stutters and misses half of your inputs because they're totally pegging JS threads loading in all the bloatware. It's a far worse experience for almost no benefit (other than for the Google engineers who made the site 3x slower to use as leverage for promotions).

Here is Gmail basic HTML for legacy browsers: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/?v%3Dlui