It’s sad. I have clear memories of browsing the web quite capably with windows 98 and 64MB of RAM (or less!) and now we can’t even do it with gigabytes.
It also highly depends on what you want to browse. HN for example will work just fine without much memory. Expecting YouTube to be as light as 90s websites is asking a bit much.
Having said that, I do agree that we have overshot, and many websites are way too heavy for their use case.
Sticking with YouTube as an example, assuming for a moment that whatever device you are using does have hardware decoding, so video playback isn't dragging down performance. It still is an extremely heavy website due to all the tracking shenanigans, interactive elements and the fact that it is an SPA based design. Alternative front-ends like invidious show it is possible and in the past Google did actually provide light versions of many of their web apps specifically for this sort of use case. Sadly that is no longer the case.
- Tried creating a new blank Waterfox profile with no changes except uBlock0. It drops frames, and the borders of the video (4:3 pillarboxes on a 16:9 screen) have a blue or green tint after I seek.
- Same result in a new blank Firefox ESR 115.6.0 (last Windows 7 release) profile with uBlock0.
- The YouTube embed player at https://www.youtube.com/embed/lEuHOFgjrAo, on my main Waterfox profile, runs as smoothly as Invidious (no stutters unless I'm interacting with the player UI).