You're parsing this too narrowly. I'm not making a claim about the purpose of each request. I'm looking at the totality and saying that maybe making 200 requests to display 200 words of content is overkill.
The larger claim was that the pages are loaded with junk that affects the performance of the pages. The signal:noise ratio on modern sites is broken, and optimizing the junk can only accomplish so much. Developers need to advise stakeholders of the downside costs, performance among them, of loading sites with bloat.
Here's an article I read a while back on the impact of specifically Javascript:
https://medium.com/@addyosmani/the-cost-of-javascript-in-201...
