That’s what I’m noticing as well. The content loads, then the content slightly changes once the styling loads and then the additional large sized content loads and then the animations load. So you’re trying to explore the website while everything is constantly resizing, populating along with animations playing all over the place. Also, there is a lot of scroll bar control being taken over. It just feels so limiting to the user to scroll, which I don’t particularly enjoy about modern web design trends. I understand that animations and scroll bar triggered events are great for product release pages, but I just don’t think they’re palpable on a home page.

Why don't they load the CSS first, then HTML, then scripts?

“Who cares about performance, if our users cared about performance they’d tell us” - PM’s everywhere.

The vibe I'm getting is "glossy magazine"… though given I've not actually touched a glossy magazine outside of a waiting room in about a decade, it's entirely possible I'm out of date.

Glossy isn't my cup of tea.

These are basically all ads for something. It is like with TV-ads they are "glossy" in their own way, trying to catch the attention to sell something.

This has always been my feeling about the well-known https://www.awwwards.com/

Would be lying though to say I wasn't inspired by some of the sites they showcase.

Agree. Most of the presented sites are too dynamic for my taste, I don’t like when something on a page moves purposelessly.

yea this appears to be biased towards design and ui , maybe not even ux on some of the busy ones