I wonder, how does one survive on the "modern" internet in a place like that? I feel i would die a little inside. Seems the only reliable way would be to navigate with everything disabled, even images, and manually (or automatically) allow images that are of certain types (no gifs) / size (not too big) and etc.

I mean, that sounds so bad that i would argue you shouldn't even see the 50mb gif in that page, at all - ie it's your own fault. If your browsing "the web" with such a restrictive data plan you're playing russian roulette. It's only a matter of time before some JS heavy site or some blog with a gif "takes you down". Sure, sites waste a ton of data all over the place, but it's not their responsibility to "protect" you imo. You can't trust others to do that job. The browser vendors should be, or something.

>Are there (tech) news-sites which do not have this 10-100MB bloat with three js framweorks and gifs, ads and whatnot?

The HackerNews comment section, with the added benefit of it being more informative.

It's kind of a PIA, but I enjoy using umatrix and ublock origin. Allows me to only turn on the stuff that I want.

There's AMP, if you don't mind trading one set of problems for another.

You could do what I do and open them in Links/Lynx, a command-line browser. You only need the text, anyways, right?