Worse still, a lot of "modern" designs don't even both including that trivial amount of content in the page, so if you've got a bad connection you get a page with some of the style and layout loaded, but nothing actually in it.

I'm not really sure how we arrived at this point, it seems like use of lazy-loading universally makes things worse, but it's becoming more and more common.

I've always vaguely assumed it's just a symptom of people having never tested in anything but their "perfect" local development environment; no low-throughput or high-latency connections, no packet loss, no nothing. When you're out here in the real world, on a marginal 4G connection - or frankly even just connecting to a server in another country - things get pretty grim.

Somewhere along the way, it feels like someone just decided that pages often not loading at all was more acceptable than looking at a loading progress bar for even a second or two longer (but being largely guaranteed to have the whole page once you get there).