Look at the homepages of Tim Berners-Lee, Bjarne Stroustrup, and Donald Knuth. All three together have 235 kB, less than one Google SERP. Images are optimized, most of the content is above the fold, and their pages were "responsive" two decades before responsive design became a thing. But they are all ugly.
"Ugly" is subjective. Personally, I like that minimal information-rich style instead of the over-designed monstrosities I come across so often which are glittery and trendy on first glance, yet quite vapid in terms of content. They also tend to be annoyingly distracting to actually try reading, due to all the extra crap. The former feels like reading a book, the latter a tabloid.