You can’t just compare across decades of software and hardware development. Even downloading native binaries would have been sluggish, as the download would have been slow with those download speeds.
I have a couple Quarkus apps that I've run in Lambdas that start in about a second. This is without using GraalVM too! Good enough for what I was doing (taking a list of file names, finding them in an S3 bucket and zipping them into a single payload)
Web pages at the time could at most <blink>, its interactivity was extremely limited compared to what we have know. Meanwhile a java applet could include a full-blown IDE/CAD/what have you
