It's not just web pages. It's easier to build bloated things in less time than non-bloated things. For-profit companies (rightly, I'd argue) don't value the Craft as much as the Bottom Line.

My home page, though admitted sparse and functional, is a total 39 KB download, including 9 link icons and a blurred full background image. (Turns out blurring the image allows you some incredible levels of JPEG compression with few artifacts.) I worked a bit to get it there. And that's nothing compared with what some demoscene folks can do. :)

The other day in one of my "get off my lawn" moments, I declared to the Rails app I was messing with that, "Every web framework sucks!" And then quickly amended the sentiment to include every test framework and build framework, for good measure.

I mean, they have their place for rapid development, of course. But the accompanying bloat and dependency surface hurts my soul.