What’s really hilarious is how long it took imgur to render that screenshot (took about 10s for me on my mobile connection), because apparently a website that hosts images needs to be a stuffed-to-the-gills-with-JavaScript SPA too nowadays.

Remember when imgur just hosted images?

My favorite thing about Imgur is that it doesn't degrade gracefully. If something in its weird dependency graph doesn't load on a mobile connection, or because of an ad blocker, sometimes you can't even see the hosted images at all.

Nothing in your screenshot suggests that the site being an SPA is responsible for the download size.

Download size has nothing to do with it. 2mb is a breeze for the client's target audience.

However a static frontpage that loads 109 requests is prone to poor performance.

Still... you don't need to be an SPA for that kind of problem. Half the static sites I see hit that number with just trackers from various ad networks.

Exactly! As long as businesses value analytics, you will never get away with a lean package.

Nothing about an SPA requires 109 requests either.

This is Gatsby, no? Gatsby is a static site generator?

Gatsby… The static site generator which uses React to … render the static site?

I was thinking of trying it out but when I read about its architecture could not believe that such a thing may be real.

Middleman and 11ty for me.

It's Gatsby yes. For a static frontpage.

I just started consulting for them on another project so I'm light on details.

1Gbps fiber here. The total load time is because of the 109 requests.