For the curious, google's current homepage is a 200kb payload all in, or about 50 times smaller.
I did an optimization pass for a client once where I got rid of a ton of the sprites but didn't have the energy to redo it all, so it just had huge sections that were blank.
Super snappy loading afterwards though.
All my projects are server rendered with jinja/minijinja, bootstrap, jQuery, and htmx when I need a little bit of SPA behavior on forms.
No builds, just static <script src= tags. Very fast and easy. I'll never recommend anything else.
On hobby projects same script approach without any kind of build step.
I also have experimented with HTMX and Django, and that seems to be a nice combination.
Everything is AJAX again.
There are many conditions under which the hot reload just straight up crashes out regularly.
Less code is basically always better, so if you can skip the huge amounts of JS and orchestration required by modern web frameworks, then it will be easy. People are out here using React to render static pages. It's very overkill.
There might be more irony in saying it's stylized pixels without realizing that the style of the image can't be replicated with blocks of the same size but I dunno, I'm not Alanis Morissette