This amazes me with just how bloated and inefficient simple things have become.

In ~4 decades we went from literal 'netcat chat' where your message may be shorter than TCP/IP headers most of the time, to slightly more featureful but still simple with IRC, and then the IM protocols of the 90s/2000s with even more features but usually quite tame (speaking from experience of working with MSNP). After that it started getting worse with XMLification, and now the web-based stuff.

But those last two requests aren’t API requests, they’re just requests to fetch images!

...that naturally raises the question of "what images? I didn't send any."

It's horrifying to see a <40B message get turned into 730B. I suspect that the majority of the time, the actual message content you send will be dwarfed by overhead.