Thank you. That'd be like someone criticizing a coding example for a new language saying "What's the point of using OOP for implementing Tic-Tac-Toe? It's too simple to necessitate it."
I'm not criticizing the technique from the article. It's useful. I'm just expressing my confusion that the blog, simple as it looks, needs this JavaScript (and analytics are in a separate file from the one I'm referencing, it appears).
That 56K number isn't gzipped, gzipped it's only 18K (plus there's also some inline JS, some webpack boilerplate, and then analytics.js).
The reason for its size is my site is my playground. It's where I get to experiment with all the things I want to experiment with.
I also work on quite a few open source projects, which I usually test on my site before releasing them publicly just to make sure they work in production without errors.