What should have been an IMG element became this
I think the whole comparison of imgur with a blank page with an image is a bit silly. It's not just the image, its a whole application with comments,image galeries, video playing ability, and of course a ton of iframes with ads which load a lot of content (more images etc.)Try to do the same feature set without a Javascript framework and using only plain Javascript or even plain HTML and CSS, and then come and tell us about the results.Also, a lot of the bloat is probably not under the developers control and is added by non technical marketing departments, which want a tracking pixel for this, a tracking pixel for that etc.But yes its true its insane and its getting worse, and 4G and HTTP2 will not be a solution for most of us anytime soon.