Network isn't the only issue - speed of processing, and memory usage, are both things people should care about a lot more than they do.

This is equivalent to wrapping every character of your website's text in a div, precisely positioning it - at a large enough scale, or with a dynamic page, it's just eventually going to cause performance issues or even lock-ups.

I dunno -- it was visually apparent to me immediately when I opened the page. I thought it was maybe a deliberate "dotted-line" effect at first.

SVG images with lots of small individual objects don't perform very well (processing & rendering).