Worth noting this webpage is ~1MB itself. However it does have a lot of images - I'm not entirely sure why it has all of those images, but the size is not a surprise given that.
Back when I was on 28.8K dialup, I'd typically figure I could fetch a megabyte a minute. Because the site is just plain old HTML, even over a terrible connection you'll be able to start reading pretty much immediately, and the images will pop in as you go. It's a good user experience.
I know what you mean, but I remember waiting about 10 minutes for a megabyte on a 14.4k connection, and about 5 minutes on 56k. Because the phone wires were crap, the modem never synced faster than about 35k.
Yeah, I wasn't criticising the size, rather just making a meta-comment of the same form the author made himself in the article.