A significant amount of the bloat on the modern internet is to facilitate marketing and advertisements, not for the benefit of the user.

I often wonder if we see this downward spiral on sites, because their attempts to monetize increase their costs, which require them to increase monetization efforts, which increase…

If we stripped it back, how much would some of these sites really need to run?

Multimedia is inherently large, but there are a lot of diminishing returns as resolution and size increases.