Having progressive or partial reads would dramatically speed up applications, especially as we move into an era of WASM on the frontend.
A proper binary encoded format like protobuf with support for partial reads and well defined streaming behavior for sub message payloads would be incredible.
It puts more work on the engineer, but the improvement to UX could be massive.
Following the example, why is all the data in one giant request? Is the DB query efficient? Is the DB sized correctly? How about some caching? All boring, but if rather support and train someone on boring stuff.
That old chestnut again - this was true for MSDOS PCs in 1981 when the quote was said. It was still true 10 years later for whatever version of DOS was current then. People keep bringing it up as though Bill Gates said 'no one will need > 640k for all time to come'.