> no banner, no logo, no favicon...Also, no share button. No top/recommended articles. No view counter.

All of which I can live without.

Still the best way of sharing content on the web is via a url, which is handily provided, so most of these aren't even needed. As for recommended and view counts, these don't inherently add a lot of value to users. If anything, it's a nice change to have a page that doesn't try and infer my desires for once.

Should have said stats instead of counter. As the webmaster, you want to know how many visitors there are on which pages?

A simple "last 5 articles" in the corner do add value. Users frequently read more than one article.

You can get that from your logs though?

Usually not, because the hosting doesn't provide access to request logs (consider github pages, heroku, wordpress, LAMP providers).

I agree that the comparison is poor - there are business where those media components are required. But an issue with the modern web is that everything has all those components - nobody[1] cried over the lack of a "Share to Facebook" button on CNN. So, while saying stripping out all those components would solve the problem is inaccurate since those components are part of the business requirement - chances are a lot of those components aren't. Maybe you don't still need that "Share to Digg" button or maybe, as a news site, you don't need a comments section - I think it's a mix of both. Websites are being written unreasonably burdened with unnecessary features and those features are usually implemented with out-of-the-box poorly performing JS.

(As an aside - nobody nobody has ever derived value out of a page counter except the owner of the site - who could just look it up in the logs. This isn't really an argument against anything you mentioned but I found it amusing it was one of the things you brought up)

1. Mostly nobody - sure there were some folks, but then again I'd wager a significant portion of those folks were just loud voices echoing from the marketing department.

>No view counter.

Myspace era wants their featureset back.

More seriously I think for personal sites a JAMstack site is perfectly sufficient

I disabled comments on my websites and it made me a happier person.

The other things you name are present on my other website (which I linked above). The site is still blazing fast.

https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/no-comments-on-website

Follow up: I just added some social sharing buttons, but without impacting page performance. The snippet is here:

https://anonyfox.com/spells/frontend-social-buttons-without-...

Very basic but does the job I'd say. :)

My own blog is statically generated too. I don’t have most of these either, because as a user I barely care about any of them or even actively dislike them.