one raspberry pi per continent :p
e.g. I'm in a small rural village in southern france right now and I get 2GB down / 1GB up more or less with a 9ms speedtest ping (which is slow, it's often 2ms) - anyone from europe would get < 50ms ping notwithstanding the latency between them and their isp
by the time my website has, say, > 500k req/second I can definitely invest in, idk, some used 2015 i7 laptop to give myself a x10. For reference, 1M requests per second is Instagram in 2015, one of the most used websites in the world - by the time you're at that scale you've been bought by Facebook anyways.
I bought artisanal knitted socks for Christmas. If their website is faster than their knitting that’s good enough. That website is part of the 99%.
I ultimately agree with you, but in between a raspberry pi and “hefty bills CDNs” is something like a half rack at a Colo, a f5, and a couple PowerEdges.
(Half kidding)
Not every page loads 50 different resources. Not every page serves people globally. Not every page has competitors.
I might say the same about you. Be respectful.
I'm not sure you have much experience working on websites. Multiple deployments are required for performance reasons, which is the main driving force for paying hefty bills for CDNs, and their recent investment in edge computing.
You deploy to multiple deployments in multiple regions in a good part to drive down those 300ms requests to sub 50ms. Otherwise your user gets fed up and drops you in favor of a competitor.
But if you work on a service who has only a dozen users in the same region and can wait in turns to see who can make a request, go right ahead with your production raspberry pi setup.