Somewhere along the way the web got heavy. The average page now ships more code than the software that flew people to the moon, and most of it is there to convince you to stay three seconds longer.
I don't have a fix for that. But I do have a small act of resistance: this site is tiny. No trackers you didn't ask for, no cookie banner, no newsletter popup lying in wait. A handful of hand-written pages and one fake terminal that took far too long to build and pays for itself in delight every time someone finds the hidden commands.
Small websites are good for a reason that has nothing to do with performance. When a page is small, you can hold the whole thing in your head. You know where everything is. You can change one line without summoning a build system that takes longer to start than the change took to write. It feels like making something, the way building a shelf feels like making something.
The old web was full of pages like this — someone's carefully-kept list of links, a photo journal, a rant about a video game, a recipe with a life story attached. Weird, personal, and unmistakably made by a human. A lot of that got paved over by five websites wearing a trenchcoat.
So: make a small website. Put something on it that only you would put there. Link to other people's small websites. It won't scale, it won't optimize, and it won't make you a cent.
That's the point.