Further, 10 requests where 8 can be more aggressively cached, may well be better than 4 requests where none can be cached. Separating out requests isn't just a

Further, 10 requests where 8 can be more aggressively cached, may well be better than 4 requests where none can be cached. Separating out requests isn't just about maintainability, it's also about separating entities with different caching behaviour. We could just do one big request for HTML, but if there's a lot of the page that doesn't need to change, that's wasteful.