The author makes a very weak argument, not even listing any examples. There is no modern framework that is 2-3MB, that is absurd. The whole point of SPAs is to increase performance. Sure there are sites with horrible implementations of SPAs where loading the page triggers a second refresh (cough spectrum.chat cough) or that are just outrageously slow (eg. gmail), but those are certainly not the majority, and are caused by poor engineering, not the framework. Poor performance is more often caused by ads (ever surf the internet without adblock?), tracking, unoptimized images, poor client-side rendering, etc.
Although web performance is certainly a problem, the bigger problem with the web in my opinion is actually poor UX. Often when I'm on a website it's very confusing how to figure out how to do basic tasks like finding the search bar. Medium has the most appalling comment system I've ever seen, requiring 3+ clicks/refreshes to read a comment on an article.
Although I agree the web performance is a serious problem, this is a very weak article, and I'm surprised it's on the front page. I guess people will upvote anything that complains about web performance, no matter how poorly reasoned and misplaced the blame is.