We're not profiling ns/ms differences due to the weird ways that the Intel CPU decides to cache certain instructions due to idiosyncrasies, they're tools that literally spit out "stop using so many large assets so you can cut the load time to under 10 seconds" and "learn how to minify every type of file".
I frequently come across websites with several thousand lines of extraneous CSS/JS code laying around because they've imported multiple libraries (WordPress templates are usually a surefire way to see this). Websites use multiple MB images all over the place.
It's fucking insane. The web leaves everything to be desired from a development target, yet we keep trying to build a palace on a foundation of feces simply because the lipstick is so alluring.
Just as Eternal September ruined discussion on the web, basing the internet on the most poorly designed stack we could come up with has greatly hampered the speed at which we're able to advance humanity using it.
The same thing already happened with operating system development, where we used to have many differing options (with new ones coming out all the time), which for the most part sort of all worked together, but each had a different take on certain technical decisions, which we then gleaned valuable information from. Plan9 was the last well-known experimental OS to be released which actually made waves to operating system development (OpenBSD deserves a lot of credit here as well, as they're constantly thinking outside the box, but mainly in a security-related fashion). RedoxOS is the next OS project I'm peering into from a distance to learn from their decisions.
But I digress, that's why it's scary. The fact that everyone is wasting their lives trying to dress up a pig who only cares about frolicking around in the mud.
Unfortunately, that won't change because popularity dictates attention, and working on little experimental things that could truly revolutionize the world is far too risky for the vast majority to undertake.
Large companies are the only ones able to toy around with experimentation full-time, but the problem you come across is that they're usually going to make whatever they figured out proprietary, so they can make some money off it.
Never going to start a reply on a mobile device ever again, I hope my rambling was coherent enough =b
