Agreed. 99% of the websites out there today are so loaded with images and videos that they would've taken 25 minutes to open on dial up.
The issue is that I do use pictures occasionally in my posts, and these aren’t just flavor, it’ll be graphs and screenshots and stuff. I also do use Javascript purely for the client-side search [1] and going hyper-minimal kind of means a rejection of JavaScript. Search isn’t strictly “necessary” but kind of nice.
And that’s the recurring theme I keep finding; 99% of stuff can easily be converted to a dumb and fast text-only thing, but then there’s that one thing that makes me keep stuff bloated.
If I do it client-side then that makes my job a fair bit easier; I don’t need to handle any kind of complicated server logic, I don’t need to mess around with databases, I really don’t need to program at all, and if I am going to manage a blog I fundamentally want it to be about writing. Otherwise all my time goes to fucking around with configurations or figuring out why a database has crashed.
Also I hate Django and Rails and PHP and absolutely will not touch any of them unless someone is paying me. I know there are other options out there though.
The template I have still uses CSS but it’s not a ton of CSS. Probably the most problematic thing I do with it is load a custom TTF font.