If you reduce things so much that all detail is lost, you can't really reason about the original thing any more. The obvious counterpoint here is, you try turning amazon.com into a plain TXT file and see how much sales increase.
I suppose you could have custom CSS (e.g. via Stylebot) remove 90% of the elements and all but one of the pictures, but would that really make the amazon purchasing experience better?
Even the search box itself lags when typing because somehow the text input is synced to the autocomplete search?
/rant