The content on both those sites load plenty fast with JS turned on… and I'm based in Australia with our shitty connection to the rest of the world.

I just counted, and The Verge takes 20 seconds to show any content on my computer with a cold cache. With a warm cache, over 10 seconds. If I disable JS, it's less than 5 seconds either way. And I'm sitting in the headquarters of an ISP (I broke http://speedof.me/ but I'm getting over 150Mb/s).

With a cold cache The Verge takes under 7 seconds to display its homepage on my shitty 4Mbps home connection and under 4 seconds on a warm cache.

You cant measure speed on a bad connection. You are penalising websites that are not bloated because they seem just as bad to you as the two sites listed above.