This has been my experience as well. I'm sure there're sensible things to tweak on a "regular" web site to make it more mobile friendly. The web development community just went to the extreme with gimmickry and the web suffers for it, desktop or mobile.

Amen brother! We could browse the web as it was intended to be on our iPhones in 2007-11, and then this responsive fad comes along and we're back to "mobile special" designs again...(remember WAP?)

Those "mobile special" layouts are annoying enough on their own on a phone (with their dumbing down of the UI), but they are doubly annoying when you're used to the web version of a website, and have to hunt for things in the "responsive" mobile version.