There is also a bit of a design arms race going on here.

My business has a bloated site with animations, Google fonts, graphic design, etc., etc. Why? Because normie customers expect it and if I don’t have it they’ll go to a competitor that had a more “designed” website.

If most websites looked as if they were built in the year 2000 we wouldn’t lose much functionality and we’d spend much less resources on this stuff…