I'm not surprised [0], the web has been a mess for some time, but
it's really, painfully bad as of 2018. The wholesale move to
client-side, dynamic page generation is partly to blame. And for
what purpose? Client-side designs are harder to test, and more
brittle as far as dealing with odd browser dependencies. They are
also slower than generating content directly on the server-side,
when you consider that the content still has to come from the
server, except now it is coming from dozens of RPCs (add up the
network overhead of each request). Let's not forget all the
javascript loaded from third-party websites used for tracking and
ads, these slow down the sites even more.

Even those of us who try to stay within the confines of a text
browser, or gopher space have to deal with the 'modern' web when it
comes to real-life issues that are now handled online - banks,
credit cards, driver's license and registration renewals - the list
goes on. One can't easily opt-out of such essentials.

[0] gopher://uninformativ.de/0/twitpher/2018-06/2018-06-05.txt