The thing that gets me is how slow all of it is. And I’ve programmed against facebook APIs, which are ludicrously performant! Hundreds of megabytes of data in single digit milliseconds total roundtrip.

They do this in an attempt to combat ad blockers. It's an arms race that is sadly bound to create cruft like this.

exactly, one example is there are a lot of programatically absolute positioned divs to break ad-blockers or make them very inefficient, while the performance of the app suffers from many tricks like these as well.

It actually is slow, you can see the loading bar load... In 2024 with the hardware we have, it is BAD.