Seems someone said it before me... But you missed the point.

I'll respond to your statement generally though.

Basic survival on 56k was doable. Shoutcast or Pandora could even be streamed with occasional buffering while browsing more light, or less heavy, sites. On the topic of video - low quality 240 would be "manageable" again, thanks to modern compression.

Was it a good experience? Rarely. Was it passible? Certainly; and if a site optimised for load time and reduced bandwidth - it could even be near broadband "experience" with some caching tricks.

Im not saying everyone needs to be code gods and build a 96k fps... But optimizing comes from understanding what you are writing and how it works. All this bloat is the result of laziness and a looser grasp on the fundamentals. As to why we should take a harder look at optimization?

• Datacenter / cloud costs are rising... Smaller footprint - smaller bill.

• Worldwide hardware costs are rising... Less people will be building fire breathing monsters. Better optimization - better user experience - more users. Recent examples (of poor optimization:) fallout and early 2077.