That's pretty hacky, but still clever.

Out of curiosity, I recently wrote a little Elisp function to compute the "markup overhead" on a typical NY Times article, i.e. the number of characters in the main HTML page versus the number in a text rendering of it. It turns out that the page is 98.5% overhead. That doesn't even count the pointless images, ads, and tracking scripts that would also get pulled in by a normal browser. Including those, loading a simple 1000-word article probably incurs well over 99% overhead. Wow!