>Yes their design is great

Is it? I had to write a bunch of µBlock and usercss rules to make their articles somewhat readable. The sticky bars waste a lot of screen estate. Firefox reader mode (Ctrl+Alt+R) is a wonderful thing, but it breaks on some pages (I guess due to Medium's incompetence or brain-dead priorities since they're still using gist for code snippets (every single snippet in a separate iframe!) instead of spending half an hour to integrate highlight.js)

yea, it's actually surprising how heavy it is given it's all to provide a veneer of minimalism and simplicity. I run qutebrowser on musl, which is as you might guess not the most stable web experience, but one funny side effect is it makes me acutely aware of what sites are simple and what ones do too much. the three worst sites, that consistently 100% of the time freeze the tab they're opened in, are reddit wapo and medium

Yes there's a massive contrast between their minimalist and slick brand and their actual platform which is one of the heaviest blogging platform.

I'm not sure what it does really but you can achieve a similar design with a few Kb of CSS.

Yeah, I emailed Sijmen Mulder to have my blog listed on his excellent text-only blog list: https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html

They all load almost instantly.

I actually found it to be not that terrible in comparison to some other sites that are out there today. Medium loads 17 scripts totalling about 2.4MB of js. For comparison, reddit loads 78 scripts totalling 7.5 MB.

Is it heavy for such a simple blog? Yes absolutely. Is it heavy for a modern React app? Not really. I think the crux of it is that we often rely too much on heavy frameworks for React even for simple things. It's definitely an antipattern in development today.

For an app like medium, client side react with that many dependencies is perhaps not the right approach in the first place?

Server Side Rendering(react or w/o react) would be a better way to do serve their content and have the added benefit support users who have no js support (noScript , terminal based browsers, screen readers? etc)

Obligatory: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

(Given your numbers and the ones in the talk, it would appear medium pages have doubled in size since the talk was given).

But yeah, I think folks reach for heavyweight frameworks too quickly. You shouldn't be using React for a blog.

I just checked one of my longer articles and my website loads 11678 bytes including the article and 23.39kb, including CSS, custom fonts and and images.

I would think that 0.5mb should be more than enough.