Worse still, a lot of "modern" designs don't even both including that trivial amount of content in the page, so if you've got a bad connection you get a page with some of the style and layout loaded, but nothing actually in it.

I'm not really sure how we arrived at this point, it seems like use of lazy-loading universally makes things worse, but it's becoming more and more common.

I've always vaguely assumed it's just a symptom of people having never tested in anything but their "perfect" local development environment; no low-throughput or high-latency connections, no packet loss, no nothing. When you're out here in the real world, on a marginal 4G connection - or frankly even just connecting to a server in another country - things get pretty grim.

Somewhere along the way, it feels like someone just decided that pages often not loading at all was more acceptable than looking at a loading progress bar for even a second or two longer (but being largely guaranteed to have the whole page once you get there).

You WILL watch this flashy, totally necessary popup video on 4G and you WILL like it!

Other than a couple of top-tier ad companies like Google and FB, ad companies tend to have really bad technology. They can’t attract the best engineering talent because everyone hates ads and they are a mess to work with. As a result, advertising code is garbage and runs like shit. News sites who are not primarily tech companies are at the mercy of ad companies to run their advertising and they end up piled down with third party crap. Most small ad companies are smash-and-grab efforts by a few ruthless entrepreneurs to vampire away small sites’ revenue or steal a bunch of user data and sell it. They all want to be acquired by a bigger company and walk away with some cash. No one is working on solving problems long term.