I just counted, and The Verge takes 20 seconds to show any content on my computer with a cold cache. With a warm cache, over 10 seconds. If I disable JS, it's less than 5 seconds either way. And I'm sitting in the headquarters of an ISP (I broke http://speedof.me/ but I'm getting over 150Mb/s).

You cant measure speed on a bad connection. You are penalising websites that are not bloated because they seem just as bad to you as the two sites listed above.