Let me trade one dead horse for another: Product and marketing teams are at fault for all this. Or if you prefer, the advertising industry is at fault.
Take the payload of any typical blog or (God help you) your small-town newspaper website and count how many requests correspond to the actual content. Now ask yourself, who's paying someone to bloat this website, and why?
The bottom line is that nobody really has any strong incentives to advocate for performance, so it falls by the sidelines.
If your school uses gsuite (which they likely will given free stuff and integration), you can't choose not to use gsuite.
Same way as dev employees are forced by companies to prioritise features over optimisation.
Yet they keep on adding more and more crap, soon Gmail is going to load for over a minute..
I once saw a website that took a full minute to load, and it was literally a page with images, text overflowing around it, and then some download links. But the way it was built... my god, the way it was built.
That company brought in a new "CTO", and his solution was to dump the entire thing in google cloud. I shit you not, this CTO initially installed an EOL version of PHP, and when errors started happening, he started submitting PR's to revert the PHP code to be compatible with the EOL version of PHP.
Dumpster Fire.
Been there, done that, have scars.
I'm more inclined to believe he googled and blindly followed an old guide with an old ppa than I am to believe that google cloud by default installed an EOL PHP server.
I'm pretty sure he was a node guy who found himself in the PHP world.