Loading Wired.com with uBlock and no javascript the page comes in below 1.5MB for me, with most functionality seemingly intact (in that the front page looks mostly normal and I can load articles that appear to have their text completely intact). The bulk of that seems to be fonts and images, which are probably unavoidable for a media site.
Some reasonable noscript whitelisting for Wired.com and a few others (out of 12 total that noscript shows me) gives a page size that's still under 5MB.
Looking at the full page with everything loaded and unblocked, the biggest offender here seems to be not web design, but an aggressively downloading autoplay video on the front page. Without that the page itself is - while not necessarily great - at least reasonably bearable.
Truth be told, I'd started this post intending to blame advertisers, and there is still some merit to that since even before the video kicks in the various third party scripts balloon the page size several times over from the minimal functional one that loads with everything blocked. But in this case, it does simply seem to be a wasteful media stream playing without regard to whether anyone wants it to or not.