> The mobile web as a whole has gotten faster due to network speeds+cpu improvements.
What's distinctly lacking in that assessment is web applications getting more resource efficient, or more conservative with storage. I'd argue that hardware and CPU improvements are enabling bad tech stacks, like a friend might enable an alcoholic. Sure, you can minify, tree-shake, etc but with sufficient hardware, you don't strictly have to.
I also don't see TFA as an actual rebuttal of the hypothesis, since it focuses on the US. Half the planet has an uplink, so you're gonna end up with skewed results if you focus only on the top end of the technology distribution. While a rural connection in the US might be just as bad as a connection in rural India, I'd wager the mean and average connection speeds and latency are still way better in the US. The Internet is for everyone, not just Silicon Valley engineers on a MacBook Pro connected through fibre optics.
What's distinctly lacking in that assessment is web applications getting more resource efficient, or more conservative with storage. I'd argue that hardware and CPU improvements are enabling bad tech stacks, like a friend might enable an alcoholic. Sure, you can minify, tree-shake, etc but with sufficient hardware, you don't strictly have to.
I also don't see TFA as an actual rebuttal of the hypothesis, since it focuses on the US. Half the planet has an uplink, so you're gonna end up with skewed results if you focus only on the top end of the technology distribution. While a rural connection in the US might be just as bad as a connection in rural India, I'd wager the mean and average connection speeds and latency are still way better in the US. The Internet is for everyone, not just Silicon Valley engineers on a MacBook Pro connected through fibre optics.