alt Hacker News20+ mb is also the weight of rendering the HTML inside each client, instead of at the server. It is the weight of continuous disdain for users, and of 30 years of not giving a fuck about adding yet another abstraction layer and making it someone else's problem.
You can somewhat "fix" this by using your slow link to connect to a VPS somewhere that then connects to the Internet, either via links or a similar text-mode browser, or other bandwidth-saving gateway.