I mean, I do. I hate websites that take many seconds to completely load when I know they could take less than 1 second without the bloat.
Hardcore desktop gamers and developers usually are also very performance conscious but that is minority.
Sites keep piling hits while adding bloat, and it's totally counterintuitive. Why?
They do. Just because they can’t put it into words doesn’t mean that they don’t care. In the early days of iOS (and to a lesser extent today, with Android finally realizing that latency is important), many people preferred iOS to Android precisely because the former “felt smoother”.
1. Pick up remote. Type "5", "4", "OK". Put down remote.
2. Wait for 5 seconds. A "5" appears on the screen.
3. Wait for 2 seconds. A "4" appears on the screen.
4. Wait for 2 seconds. Channel switches.
I sold it and got a 40" screen for my PC instead. The PC actually boots faster than the "Smart" TV.
Manufacturers like LG and Samsung are terrible at UX/UI, and then you have others using Android TV which is great but using crappy low performance SOCs like Sony does.
Most of those sites are "free". People are willing to wait for things that they want to consume and are available for free, up to some limit.
If we're talking about websites that offer some sort of utility -- i.e. it does something for you and you need to interact with it often. Then its responsiveness is likely going to be a much bigger factor.
If gmail loads your inboxes and emails in hundreds of milliseconds but yahoo took several seconds, and a person needs to respond to lots of emails during the day, I'm sure the person would develop a preference for the former if all other things are equal.
Right, they are going to wait 4-6 seconds and then maybe go back if the page doesn't load.
But that's an insane amount of time which is why I think most people don't really care about bloat until they think "hey this isn't working".
But I concede that you have a point with the tools vs websites to consume information. There is no difference for me personally, loading and reading a website is part of using it.
Clicking on the link to comments took about 4-5 seconds to render the comments.
Doing a back then forward action in the browser appeared to be almost instantaneous (10's of milliseconds).
I have noticed that many websites are being significantly slower these days. It, of course, could be due to the national monitoring scheme that is required now here in Australia.
Using TOR to get access was a little slower to get access by about a second, otherwise back and forward are the same.