Well, the post I replied to said "on a 10G connection peered within 5ms of the host" so I think it's fair to assume they also were in a sterile environment. I'm even on a lower connection with 20ms+ ping!

5 year old mobile isn't as slow as you make it out to be. Cheap 2025 phones is significantly slower than my 8 years old iPad. Also 3G could be fast and it isn't the protocol that makes the speed to <1Mbps.

Could be a desktop PC with 25/3 ADSL where somebody is streaming Netflix and a game console is updating itself.

The thing is, enterprise web applications are not built for phones. This would be like telling someone to run the latest Ubisoft game on a PC from 2-3 generations ago, and expecting it to perform well.

Today's applications are more complex than ever, bloated perhaps, but the demand for features, complex visualizations, etc. rise with the patterns of seeing them more in other applications.

This. So many people—both on the dev side and the annoyed HN commenter side—act as though all websites have the same requirements. They don't. The usage profile varies enormously, and if you treat every website as just a website without considering the context it's used in you're going to either waste a lot of time optimizing things that don't matter or you're going to make your app suck by not adjusting properly for your users.