If business wants something quick and the cost of the website being slow doesn't matter... Why bother?
On the other side, I've been building websites that gets +95 on mobile on Google page speed. If no image above the fold... It gets 100. In mobile, yes. And I still have analytics, YouTube and images...
So I'd say depends by what business needs.
> just about every website and blog now presents multiple spinning boxes when its loading
The vast majority of "page" content is baked into prerendered HTML and CSS rendered. I'm not sure what spinners you're talking about unless you're referring to web apps with timelines/news feeds that dynamically load.
Users love sites that load the important content and are interactive ASAP. Trust me, they appreciate your boring (fast) HTML.
It's come to the point where i feel bad for using plain old single-request-loading html, because it doesn't look 'spinny' enough, and users may think it's uncool.