Oh hey let's load up your webpages with all this cr*p by default, tons of javascript, css, external files, fonts, headers, footers useless markup.
Oh hey, let's use this plugin to strip all that out.
How about not putting it in there in the first place.
A significant amount of WordPress related overhead would disappear if developers would keep resources to a minimum and provide a way to turn them off without writing additional code. Or if there was some built in system that tried to bundle together the CSS and JS files.
Let's look at the first lines of WordPress's default template:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US">
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
Why dir and lang if you don't really know what language the content is in? We now have the funny situation that most non-English pages wrongly declare lang="en-US" because W3C evangelists told template authors that lang is really important, rendering the attribute completely useless.
What the heck is profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11" supposed to do?
As for the "lang" attribute, it is set to the language chosen when WordPress was installed.
<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en" class="no-js"> <head>
I checked back to Twenty Fourteen and didn't see the lines you referenced. Regardless, it's a silly argument, the default themes are "reference" themes, meant to show off all the features WordPress offers and of course don't represent all WP themes.