>Websites that are Just Text On A Page should load fast, but many don't. Hacker News is blazing fast, but Google's API docs never load.

Things aren't always that simple.

I'm in the UK, and my ping time to news.ycombinator.com is 147ms - presumably because it's not using a CDN and is hosted in the USA.

cloud.google.com on the other hand has an 8ms ping time.

So yes, Hacker News is a simple, low-JS page - but there can be other factors that make it feel slow for users in some places. This is despite me being in a privileged situation, having an XGS-PON fibre connection providing symmetric 8Gbps speeds.