Reminds me of the UK's Government Digital Services, who want to digitise government processes but also have a responsibility to keep that service as accessible and streamlined as possible, so that even a homeless person using a £10 phone on a 2G data service still has an acceptable experience.
An example. Here they painstakingly remove JQuery (most modern frameworks are way too big) from the site and shave 32Kb off the site size.
Getting away from reddit has shown me that there are unspoiled places in the digital world out there, communities of people who actually care about the topic and not performatism and internet attention.
a) don't let in anyone who acts like petulant children
b) give adults an outlet for occasional outbursts that would make them sound like petulant children
The issue with UK services is that they all are fucking random and plenty of sections don't work. There are billions of logins, bugs and sometimes you just get redirected to some bloody nightmare portal from 1990-s. And EU citizens couldn't log in into HMRC portal for years after Brexit, what a fucking joke! And all they do is spend time removing jQuery, good fucking job!
At a certain point it makes more sense to subsidize better low-end hardware than to make every web site usable on a 20 year old flip phone. I'd argue that if saving 32 kB is considered a big win, you're well past that point. Get that homeless guy a £50 phone and quit wasting the time of a bunch of engineers who make more than that in an hour.
I'm all for ending homelessness, but that's really a different problem than we were discussing. I'm pretty confident jQuery isn't stopping anyone from being housed.
Anyway, there's no way you're gonna convince me 32 kB is a lot of data. It's just not. Even the slowest 3G connections can download that much in half a second. Just the text of this thread is probably more than 32 kB. If you can't download that much data, you only technically have Internet service at all.
At least in the US, the reason 3G isn't available is that it has been phased out, as has 2G. You may as well complain about how slow it is to send data with smoke signals, because 4G is table stakes for an internet-capable device now.
US? US is wild place. A lot of people still on ADSL, but 2G and 3G equipment is thrown away and say "lol, you problem, buy new phone". I won't be surprised that there are a lot of places where internet is less stable than in a train going through tunnel under the mountain in the middle of Siberia. Which means no internet.
I wonder what happens to internet connection in rural areas of USSA, since you suddenly started talking about it.
In Europe(or at least in my part of Europe) there are places where mobile internet is overloaded like subway system and city center and places where mobile internet is very unstable like my house in suburban area and, agan, trains.
And, as I mentioned, bitbucket. It struggles to load even on average PC.
Where I live even 4G isn't all that reliable. Making a phone call is mostly impossible and a text message is hit or miss unless I'm in a town or along a major road, This is due to terrain and the general lack of towers. 4G is spotty at best and with many areas having no service at all. And I ain't never going to live long enough to ever see 5G out here.
But, I would agree that while 32KB is pretty minor for an internet connection, things have a way of stacking. 32KB here, another extra 32KB there and pretty soon things can get 'heavy' to use.
Also, engieneers already had tech debt of updating to new jQuery version, which can result in a lot of wierd bugs, so it was achiveing two goals at once.