Because most sites aren't interested in their users who use bad hardware as a market share. The most attractive client base are the ones with money to spend.

Fair point, but even high end users have bad connection sometimes.

Rich people tend to be old, and not all, but many old people have bad hardware, even if they are rich. Meanwhile, 87% of US teenagers have iPhones.

It matters a lot. I just spent three days on a 130kbps 1000+ms latency high packet loss connection, and RTT was one of the problems that made lots of sites I tried (practically) unusable, due to launching dependent queries in series without any retries. The other big one was gigantic interaction-blocking assets served from CDNs with aggressive timeouts.

SV techbros are a fun pinata to smash, but that's a load of bullshit intended to conflate individual workers (easily hateable and zero power to fix anything) with ad-tech/paywalls/lead acquisition/overoptimisation driven by profit-seeking (too diffuse to hate, too little understood for lawmakers to regulate effectively...yet), and make slow websites seem like a technical or competency problem instead of an auctioning-your-eyeballs-and-spamming-you-with-modals.

Pretty sure the guilt is shared. The profit seeking personal data peddlers don't choose overengineered solutions that only make sense at google scale.

I also have a feeling hardware designers could use being forced to live somewhere that's not a dust less constant temperature air conditioned office in California, but that's another matter for a different rant.

The SV techbros should have to test their sites on 2010-era notebooks running through two VPNs connecting through Australia and Finland.