> `gwern.net` does not suffer from absolute madness, but the use of custom font means that the site is a blank page for thousands of milliseconds, and this old iPad has trouble scrolling the page of text even after the font is rendered.

I use the standard `display: swap;` settings on fonts, so you shouldn't be seeing blank pages at all, your Safari browser should be showing the text immediately (and then, possibly, re-rendering once the SSfP font subset downloads). When I check https://caniuse.com/css-font-rendering-controls for Safari support, I see that Safari browsers got swap like 5 years ago. (Relatively quick, as Safari things go...) So I think that explains your problem. You are just using such an ancient browser (all Safari versions that old collectively constitute like 0.3% market share now) that it lacks basic performance optimizations that web devs need to take for granted. I held up my half of the bargain and used the relevant optimizations. Perhaps it's time you upgrade?