> Hydration, lazy loading, managing flashes of unstyled content, a lot of this is built to address things that wouldn't be problems if we treated the browser as the dojo that it is and not be so dang wasteful.
What's your point here, exactly? That if random wordpress blogs and recipe websites were less wasteful, the problems these solutions are addressing would not exist?
I can make you an extremely non-wasteful webapp which still needs to display a hundred images on a page (because reasons), so lazy-loading the images is still important.
I can find you a very well-optimized website that is only a few kilobytes, but still loads slow as shit because their network is bad and I'm on a terrible 3G link. FOUC would still be an issue.