I actually found it to be not that terrible in comparison to some other sites that are out there today. Medium loads 17 scripts totalling about 2.4MB of js. For comparison, reddit loads 78 scripts totalling 7.5 MB.

Is it heavy for such a simple blog? Yes absolutely. Is it heavy for a modern React app? Not really. I think the crux of it is that we often rely too much on heavy frameworks for React even for simple things. It's definitely an antipattern in development today.