Let's play a game, I go onto the Neocities browse page and sort by "special sauce" and measure the weight of the first few pages as follows: 11.09MB, 45kB, 1.84MB, 22.87MB(!), 345kB. I know this is not a large sample size but what the hell?! 22MB is an absolutely insane size for a webpage and Firefox felt like it was dying whilst trying to load it, consider the fact that the average webpage on today's web is around 2.5MB! Now it goes without saying of course that people are free to do whatever they want to with their own websites and I'm not tring to police that, but some of these are completely crazy. Just because Neocities is a Geocities revival I can't assume that every website here is attempting to be 'old-school', but a look at the tags of a website can give a rough idea of the creator's vision. I did a search using the "oldweb" tag as one would assume sites using it would be relatively efficient, but almost immediately I found a 10.97MB page that was incredibly painful to watch as it slowly loaded in and did not fit my monitor. The background image was 1.6MB but was in gif format, perhaps suggesting some failed attempt at optimisation? My rural internet speed is not great, but it certainly isn't dial-up speed despite feeling like it sometimes.
Please, some of us don't have 5G or fibre optic! You are not rebelling against the problems of the modern web if your "retro" page takes 20 seconds to load!