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.