It looks good for technical people. It does not look good for others.
I am also sure she would love these selfsame pages to load instantly when shes accessing them via her old cell phone at my uncles house where reception is bad and the device has to revert to 3G.
No, "other" people don't want bloat, tons of adds and "clever designs" (aka. a huge useless picture-banner that contains zero information) either.
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/ - 12MB https://www.jamieoliver.com/ - 4.3MB https://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/ - 8.4MB
It seems their users didn't wanted them to be so barebone.
I am not saying people want bloat, but they won't accept HN-style simplicity. What I'd like to have is good looking sites with no CSS at all, just make them acceptable by default, and a lot of this bloat will simply go away.
No we don't.
As I have written before in this topic, HN is the perfect example. It pulls in a small css and js file, both of which are so slim, they don't even require minifying. The resulting page is small, looks good, is performant and most importantly does its jobs.
We don't need megabytes worth of cruft to display a good looking page.