I used all of those things - irc, the web (gopher), etc., at 9600 baud for years. Wasn't a problem.

Also, you don't really need to configure a browser - just use lynx, which will ignore most of the bandwidth hungry aspects of a site.

When we used the Internet at slow speeds or in batch mode we had people being cautious with bandwidth. Usenet had the informal McQ limit for signatures, which led to newsgroups like alt.fan.warlord to mock people with big or ugly sigs.

The text on the current top story (the Wright Brothers article) is about 11kbytes. That doesn't include any html or css or anything else. That would make a page load at over ten seconds just for the text.

The point isn't that it can not be done, but that people would not tolerate it unless they had a real need.

I regularly use links (as opposed to lynx) to access text heavy sites; nice, clean, distraction-free reading.

I stuck with ~30K bps a lot longer than was reasonable (it's still been years...). HN would be fine, a few seconds waiting for a few minutes reading. Megabyte js monstrosities were the problem, they would time out.