True, I've done this for sites that had really slow loading webfonts and/or remote css pages. Although we really can't say what it looked like without the rest of the page contents. I don't suppose anyone has a page source dump.

I wonder sometimes if this sort of activity (honey pots for autobanning) angers people because they feel they have a right to script the site or if they feel poorly for "falling for" the honeypot. Clearly it generates some emotion though.

No need to override the CSS, if your connection is unstable enough the CSS load can simply fail, and the page will display unstyled.

There even are browsers out there that simply don't support CSS.

Lynx seems a likely candidate, though I'm not positive it has zero support.

Konqueror on RHEL seems more likely than Lynx.