Mobile design was something created for old phones that didn't have quite the resolution of computer monitors. Modern phones don't really need mobile designed sites.

Kinda doesn't though. Mobile most of all needs concessions for the much more limited input precision.

Personally I prefer pinch zoom for input precision instead of overly mobile design.

You need text to scale and reflow to device width if you want text to be readable. This is one of the main reasons for mobile web design. Else you're stuck panning around the screen to read the text zoomed in.

Once you decide to scale text to device size so that it's readable, you are stuck doing the rest of mobile web design (fluid layout).

You need to allow users to scale text as desired, as the original web intended. You shouldn't make a site targeted to mobile; you should make a site that allows the user to display in their client as they wish.

The problem will fix itself.

I don't understand what that means in practice except to evangelize the tenets of mobile (fluid) design.

How are you going to make a site that lets the user display the site as they wish without just making a reflowable mobile-friendly site?

Desktop sites are generally static and have nonfluid components like sidebars which is how fluid design became necessary in the mobile age which seems to be what you are proposing.

If by fine you mean I need to zoom and pan to read it then I guess it does, but I doubt anyone would call that "working well on mobile".

I would take

>need to zoom and pan to read

over every time I forbidden to pan and zoom by the site author.

Especially when I'm behind 43" 4k monitor and the site decide

WHAT TEN LINES

PER SCREEN

IS EVERYTHING

I WISHED FOR

It works way better for me on mobile than most new sites do.

Developers assume everyone has the latest iPhone or Pixel. So they take like a minute to load, heat my phone up, drop the battery by 10%, and have a 20% chance of OOM-ing my browser.

The Guardian is the absolute worst at this. I don't know why, it brings mobile Firefox to its knees.

Basically, fancy "mobile friendly" JS is no good if it makes my phone stutter and go catatonic.

Whereas if people just wrote old school "CSS Zen Garden" sites, or even this old table stuff, any ancient phone could handle them easily.

But no, I need to go pay a kid to dig up more coltan.

I can scroll. It's ok. What I can't do is will my phone faster, without shelling out more stupid cash.