I'm also guessing, but I suspect that the sharp rise of mobile was a contributing factor. Mobile can have good throughput but not so good latency so packing mor

I'm also guessing, but I suspect that the sharp rise of mobile was a contributing factor. Mobile can have good throughput but not so good latency so packing more per request makes a lot of sense. At one place I worked we actually made two BFF (backend-for-frontend) servers that took one client request, made many within datacenter requests, put a single response together and sent it all back. We had one for mobile and one for web. We only had one datacenter region so made sense for global users regardless of throughput.