Hi wldlyinaccurate, thanks for your comment. There are a lot of frontend performance things we are focusing on for the next release. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/23213.
Is there a strategy to tackle the CSS and JS bloat?
Is performance something the front-end endboss folk consider important enough to delay feature releases?
Are you monitoring performance with a tool like SpeedCurve?