Indeed, it's instead a symptom of the software bloat that the OP discusses. Hardware is quite literally millions of times more powerful than it was 25 years ag

Indeed, it's instead a symptom of the software bloat that the OP discusses. Hardware is quite literally millions of times more powerful than it was 25 years ago, but software is slower. Many of the most egregious examples of this happen to be on the web because a) it involves an additional layer of abstraction, relative to OS-native applications; b) designers are involved more in web apps than native apps, and they refuse to use native browser widgets, which are performant; and c) for a handful of reasons web development culture is biased towards building on top of existing libraries, which results in excessive layers of abstraction. And then you add the networking layer (and for many web apps having your data "in the cloud" adds very little beyond what a native app provides even without background data syncing), and add seconds to every tiny interaction that used to seem instantaneous.