All of this is true, from a technical standpoint, but does any of it really matter in the modern world?

This sounds a bit like a structural engineer designing an elegant, perfectly constructed shopping mall, and then complaining about the massive corporate/commercial, orgiastic takeover that occurred after the mall opened.

With the exception of bandwidth concerns on data-capped mobile plans and diehard *nix fans that do all their web browsing with Lynx, why does bloat matter? Every one of those linked sites loaded on my home 10Mbps connection in <1 second to my eyes.