> Nowadays, we still wait the same amount of time for the initial load, but now your CPU is at 100% parsing megabytes of shitty Javascript, and once the initial load completes, you're still not guaranteed the page won't slow down/overload your CPU again because some stuff can be asynchronously loaded (supposedly for performance reasons, even though doing it on the backend as part of the initial load would be faster in the vast majority of cases).

The new reddit site is fast. Yes initial load time is like 2 seconds, but after that, everything else is instant. Click comments, escape out, go back to feed, load comments of a different story, it is quick.

Yes crappy JS abounds everywhere, NYT is an offender recently (they used to be good!), lots of sites suck in this regard, but when modern web dev is done well, it works really well.

Though having read the Reddit engineering blog posts, they throw a ton of resources at ensuring Reddit is fast.

Meanwhile, Ars Technica loads things almost instantly, but for the last year or two (!!) their article pages have leaked memory and CPU, eventually taking up all my CPU and gigs of memory.

Not sure how even. Great load times, responsive site, keep that background tab open and watch the CPU start to melt down.