Part of the problem is analagous to traffic congestion / highway lane counts: "if you build it, they will come". More lanes get built but more cars appear to fi

Part of the problem is analagous to traffic congestion / highway lane counts: "if you build it, they will come". More lanes get built but more cars appear to fill them. Faster connection speeds allow more stuff to be included, and the human tolerance for latency (sub 0.1s?) hasn't changed, so we accept it. Web sites and apps are sidled with advertising content and data collection code; these things often get priority over actual site content. They use bandwidth and computing resources, in effect slowing everything down. Arguably, that's the price we pay for "free internet"? Finally (and some others have mentioned this), the software development practices are partially to blame. The younger generation of devs were taught to throw resources at problems, that dev time is the bottleneck and not cpu or memory -- and it shows. And that's those with some formal education; many devs are self-taught, and the artifacts of their learning manifest in the code they wrote. This particularly in the JS community, which seems hellbent on reinventing the wheel instead of standing on the shoulders of giants.