The only Twitter exposure I have is via HackerNews and that bothered the crap out of me too, so I wrote a dead-simple userscript that is run with ViolentMonkey in Chrome to take me to Nitter instead. The redirect and page load all completes before I would probably even see the loading spinner on Twitter. What a garbage site.

https://pastebin.com/ZpgYYF1N

Yeah, it's really painful. +1 to all the Nitter recommendations. I use Invidition (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/invidition/) to redirect (Twitter, YouTube) -> (Nitter, Invidious). It also can automatically pick the fastest responding instance, which makes a noticeable difference.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/invidition/

While at it, have you tried nitter.net? It's very handy for opening twitter links on mobile, where I want things to be lightweight.

While probably a rhetorical question.

GT Metrix is a good site to answer - see the waterfall view: https://gtmetrix.com/

Also right click and inspect on your browser.

Can only recommend libredirect https://libredirect.github.io/

Do you have a "More tweets" section under the main tweet? I have one, and I imagine that that is both generated on-the-fly and tailored to my browsing behavior. So it probably interrogates a larger system, adding latency. I'd bet as well that there is some fetching of 'live' quote/retweet/like counts, that probably occurs in some kind of interval.

Not sure, but I've been experiencing dramatically worse load times on Twitter in the last month or so.

Probably the 1000ms!!! it takes for the GraphQL on tweets to respond. Ooph.